The Impact of COVID-19 on Students' Interprofessional Education Experience, Their Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Interprofessional Collaborative Practice
Background: During the COVID pandemic, a large first-year blended interprofessional education (IPE) course, HLTH1000, where students collaborate in small interdisciplinary teams, pivoted to an external, online teaching and learning mode. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of the online IPE course experience on students’ perceptions and attitudes towards interprofessional learning.
Method: A pre-test post-test design was used to evaluate students from 14 different disciplines in the Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences in 2019, blended and 2020, online respectively. Students were invited to complete a survey consisting of a validated questionnaire, the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) and demographic information before the course and on completing the course.
Results: There were 1427 students enrolled in HLTH1000 in 2019, with 1310 completing the pre-questionnaire and 607 (46.5%) the post-questionnaire. In 2020, there were 1352 students enrolled with 1258 completing the pre-questionnaire and 769 (61%) the post questionnaire. There were no significant differences in demographics between the cohorts with approximately two thirds of female students in both cohorts. For the 2019 students, the RIPLS mean test scores for the domains: Teamwork and Collaboration (Pre=39.54 ± 8.65; Post=37.84 ± 11.15, p=0.001), Positive Professional Identity (Pre=16.70 ± 3.93; Post=15.80 ± 5.01, p=0.000) and Roles and Responsibilities (Pre=9.79 ± 2.57; Post=9.16 ± 3.06, p=0.000) decreased significantly with a non-significant increase in the Negative Professional Identity domain (Pre=5.61 ± 2.82; Post=5.76 ± 3.30, p=0.354). For the 2020 students, there was a statistically significant change in the domain: Roles and Responsibilities (Pre=38.09 ± 11.63; Post=37.50 ± 12.91, p=0.000) with non-significant differences between the mean test scores across the remaining three domains. There was a greater magnitude of change in Teamwork and Collaboration scores in 2019 (-4.29%) compared to 2020 (-1.54%). Similarly, greater change in Positive Professional Identity was reported in 2019 (-5.38%) than in 2020 (-2.47%).
Conclusion: Moving HLTH1000, a large first-year blended interprofessional education (IPE) course, to online in 2020 did not impact students’ perceptions and attitude towards interprofessional learning. The findings from this study suggest that inter-disciplinary knowledge sharing and collaboration towards was not compromised, and students’ motivation towards learning together in an online format was not reduced. These results may reflect that both facilitators and students, in the 2020 cohort, adapted quickly to the online format and students were still able to achieve the same learning outcomes as their counterparts in 2019 .
