Interprofessional education in an enrichment programme for prospective health sciences students

ABSTRACT

Effective and meaningful interprofessional education opportunities for prospective health sciences students are important to prepare students for the work environment they will encounter after training. This article briefly describes the Summer Academic Enrichment Program, a programme for students pursuing entry to dentistry, medicine, pharmacy, and physical therapy schools. The programme evaluation includes investigation of the programme’s effectiveness to impact attitudes towards interprofessional teams and collaboration. The Attitudes Toward Health Care Teams Scale and the Revised Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale were administered at the beginning and the end of the programme. Statistical analysis of pre-assessment subscale scores indicated that pre-pharmacy students reported significantly more positive attitudes towards team value than pre-dental students at the beginning of the programme, with post-assessment results indicating that these differences had been eliminated. Additionally, all students demonstrated significantly more positive attitudes towards interprofessional teams during the post-assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• evaluation
• evaluation research
• interprofessional education
• teamwork

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Divya Varier and Alexandra Hoffman for their edits and comments to improve this manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.