DIGITAL LIBRARY
INTERDISCIPLINARY HEALTH TEAM, CAN BE INCLUDED IN THE UNIVERSITY CURRICULA?
1 University of Granada, Faculty of Health Sciences (SPAIN)
2 University of Castilla la Mancha, Faculty of Health Sciences (SPAIN)
3 University of Granada, Faculty of Medicine (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2011 Proceedings
Publication year: 2011
Pages: 2897-2902
ISBN: 978-84-615-3324-4
ISSN: 2340-1095
Conference name: 4th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 14-16 November, 2011
Location: Madrid, Spain
Abstract:
Introduction
Health and social care professionals, such as doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and social workers, need to work together effectively to take care of patients effectively. Unfortunately, professionals may not always work well together.
A number of factors, such as an ageing population and the shift of the burden of illness from acute to chronic care, require a number of different health and social care professions to be involved in the delivery of care.
Training and educational programmes have been developed as a possible way to improve how professionals work together to take care of patients. Interprofessional education (IPE) is any type of educational, training, teaching or learning session in which two or more health and social care professions are learning interactively. It offers a possible way to improve collaboration and patient care.

There is an increasing complexity of the organisation and delivery of health care need active strategies that can be developed in the University. It may influence the willingness to cooperate and the quality of teamwork in health sciences students.
The purpose of this experience is to develop the perception of health team between the health professionals who work together.

Materials and methods
Audiovisual materials from real patients were recorded to develop six different clinical case studies in pulmonary pathologies.
Students from four different health sciences disciplines (nurses, physiotherapist, occupational therapist and medical students) were invited to participate. The different discipline students were organized in groups of four persons; they resolve the different cases guided by a professor. All the groups were instructed to present their case solution making the importance of their intervention like professionals. The case solution was presented in a multidisciplinary session by every discipline group. All the disciplines presented their clinical approach to the same clinical case.
All the participants completed different questionnaires about interprofessional values, skills and strategies before and after the interdisciplinary session.

Results
The initial responses of the students shows results who indicate that they perceive their teamwork climate differently as a function of their role in the health unit. Those results reflect the previous clinical experience in the different clinical specialties during the curricula.
In the beginning nurses and medical students have better values of interdisciplinary valuation when compared with physiotherapist and occupations therapist students.

The result of this experience shows significantly (P< 0.001) better value of the different health professional figures from all the participants when we compare initial and final questionnaires.
Curiously physiotherapist and occupational therapist have the higher scores when we compare the initial and final valuations from the other health students.

Conclusions
Without doubt Interprofessional health team shows to be effective strategy to create health professionals prepared to work in health team.
We think that maybe the different experiences on Interprofessional health team who shows good results can be more effectively if are developed on the actual curricula of the health students.
Keywords:
Health team, interdisciplinary, university students.