Effects of an Online Interprofessional Health Sciences Undergraduate Education Program on Student Self-Evaluation of Teamwork

With today’s complex health and social problems, it has become essential that healthcare professionals work to collectively utilize interprofessional knowledge and collaborative skills capable of better meeting the populations’ needs. Interprofessional education (IPE) is one of the ways these skills can be gained. Most interprofessional education (IPE) in North America occurs within graduate-level healthcare programs. The introduction of IPE at the undergraduate, pre-professional level has begun to be explored, however, the extent to which the utilisation of an online/virtual IPE platform for pre-professional, undergraduate students as had little, if any, study to date. The purpose of the present study was to examine pre-professional, undergraduate students’ self-perceptions toward their interprofessional collaboration and teamwork skills at the beginning and end of an online/virtual 12-week (8-9 hours/week) IPE course to explore whether the course impacted/changed their perspectives. Utilizing Quality Assurance data collected within Queen’s University’s Bachelor of Health Science (BHSc) 280 Interprofessional Approaches in Healthcare online undergraduate course, this project involved a secondary data analysis of 195 student responses to a validated pre- and post-course teamwork skills and collaboration measurement tool. This validated tool is called "Team-Q" and consists of 14 items to be responded to individually on a numerical-based frequency scale (Britton et al., 2017). Paired sample t-test analyses of the anonymized and coded student Team-Q scores across the pre- and post-course assessments were performed. Results indicated that the BHSc 280 IPE course may have contributed to positive changes in students’ perceptions of teamwork and collaboration, particularly regarding effective conflict resolution and constructive feedback skills. This supports the premise that online/virtual delivery of IPE can provide students with the necessary material and experiences to improve perceptions about their own knowledge, understanding and applications of interprofessional teamwork and collaboration skills; and further highlights the benefits of pre-professional level interprofessional learning opportunities.