Abstract:

Introduction:
As health care delivery continues to evolve around the notion of a team of care providers working together to improve patient outcomes, interprofessional education becomes a critical component of success. Regardless of primary discipline, educators’ focus should be on providing their students interprofessional experiences that can transform the way they learn and practice with members from other disciplines. Students’ success in such interprofessional experiences largely depends on their perceptions, attitudes, and readiness towards interprofessional education.

While professional identity development is a complex and multi-phased process (Ekmekci et al., 2010) and there are numerous barriers to harnessing the true potential of interprofessional education in health care (Macy Foundation, 2013), it might be argued that students’ receptiveness to interprofessional education – and ultimately achieving the desired core competencies – is greatly determined by students’: (a) perceptions regarding interprofessional education; (b) attitudes toward interprofessional health care teams; (c) readiness for interprofessional learning (Page et al., 2009). In order to effectively transform patient care, by way of improving students' perceptions, attitudes, and readiness regarding interprofessional education, we must “reform the education and life-long career development of health care professionals to incorporate interprofessional learning and team-based care” (Macy Foundation, 2013, p. 2).

Purpose:
Meaningful transformation of the way we educate health care professionals cannot be realistically planned and implemented, without an effective and credible way of evaluating performance and learning in interprofessional health care teams. This paper presents the findings of a recent research project in which we used the Delphi method and standardized patient simulations to develop a comprehensive and accurate assessment instrument to evaluate the way interprofessional health care teams learn and practice.

Methods:
The 12-month project consisted of two phases: (1) a three-month period during which a panel of national and global experts [20 participants in total], following the Delphi process, identified measurable factors (at the individual, team, organizational level) that potentially influence team learning and team performance, guided by key behavioral properties identified during a meta-review of survey instruments measuring teamwork in health care settings (Valentine, Nembhard, & Edmondson, 2012); and (2) a five-month period of workshops with health care students studying at GWU [a total of 28 students in total], where participants took part in simulations and engaged with faculty members through focus groups to help develop and refine the factors identified during the first phases.

Results:
An online instrument was developed to evaluate performance and learning in interprofessional health care teams built around the specific factors identified and validated during the project. The final version of the instrument, for measuring performance, contained: 10 factors defining personal attributes; 6 factors for defining personal knowledge & skills; and 12 factors for defining organizational dynamics. As for measuring learning, the instrument contained: 9 factors defining personal attributes; 6 factors for defining personal knowledge & skills; 9 factors for defining organizational dynamics; and 11 factors defining task properties.

Keywords:

Interprofessional education, evaluation, team performance, team learning, simulation.