Background: Inter-professional and interpersonal relationships in collaborative work environments can prove to be critical elements in healthcare practice. When implementers fail to understand the importance of a collaborative perspective, this can lead to communication problems which ultimately harm the users.Objectives: To improve the inter-professional collaborative work skills of Mexican students in their first year of medical and nursing degrees through the use of a training program geared toward development of interpersonal skills and interdisciplinary work.Methods: The sample was composed of 162 students (62 males and 99 females) from the School of Healthcare Sciences of the Autonomous University of Coahuila, Mexico. The main measures used were the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE); the Jefferson Scale of Attitudes toward Inter-Professional Collaborative Work between Medical and Nursing Professionals (JSAPNC); and the Jefferson Scale of Lifelong Learning (JeffSPLL). The entire sample was divided into two groups (experimental and control groups). Both groups attended an extra-curricular program using a coaching methodology. In the first case the topic focused on attitudes toward inter-professional collaborative work. In the second case, the program focused on addiction. Both programs ran for 4 months. Psychometric instruments were applied at the beginning and at the end of both programs. After analyzing the reliability of the instruments, an ANOVA test was performed.Results: The control group of medical students showed a deterioration in the development of collaborative work skills (p < 0.01), whereas in the experimental group this deterioration was not present. In the experimental group of nursing students, a significant increase in the development of collaborative work skills (p < 0.05) was observed. The differences were clearly due to the professional area of study (p < 0.001).Conclusion: There are differences in collaborative work skill development among different professional areas. These differences can be reduced through the implementation of a program aimed at developing collaborative work and interpersonal skills in the early stages of training.

Our objective was to determine the prevalence of the term preembryo in the scientific literature using a bibliometric study in the Web of Science database. We retrieved data from the Web of Science from 1986 to 2005, covering a range of 20 years since the term was first published. Searches for the terms embryo, blastocyst, preimplantation embryo, and preembryo were performed. Then, Boolean operators were applied to measure associations between terms. Finally, statistical assessments were made to compare the use of each term in the scientific literature, and in specific areas where preembryo is most used. From a total of 93,019 registers, 90,888 corresponded to embryo; 8,366 to blastocyst ; 2,397 to preimplantation embryo; and 172 to preembryo. The use frequency for preembryo was 2:1000. The term preembryo showed a lower cumulative impact factor (343) in comparison with the others (25,448; 5,530; and 546; respectively) in the highest scored journal category. We conclude that the term preembryo is not used in the scientific community, probably because it is confusing or inadequate. The authors suggest that its use in the scientific literature should be avoided in future publications. The bibliometric analysis confirms this statement. While preembryo hardly ever is used, terms such as preimplantation embryo and blastocyst have gained wide acceptance in publications from the same areas of study.

IntroductionIn Spain, biomedical research applications must receive a positive ethical opinion from Research Ethics Committees (RECs) before being executed. There is limited information on how to optimize the ethical review process to reduce delays. This study was performed to characterize variables predicting favorable opinions at the first ethical review performed by a REC.Material and MethodsThe study assessed all research applications revised by a REC in 2019–2020. Data was extracted from REC's database of La Rioja, Spain. Variables collected covered three areas: (i) principal investigator's profile; (ii) study design; and (iii) ethical review process. A model based on multiple logistic regression analysis was created to identify variables explaining favorable opinions in first rounds of ethical review processes.ResultsThe sample included 125 applications (41 submitted in 2019, and 84 in 2020). At the first review, nine (7%) applications were rejected, 56 (45%) were approved, and the remaining 60 (48%) required at least two reviews prior to approval. When comparing both years, a 2-fold increase in the number of applications submitted, and a difference in the ratio of applications with a favorable vs. non-favorable opinion were observed. Furthermore, a model predicted 71% of probability of obtaining a favorable opinion in the first ethical review. Three variables appeared as being explanatory: if the principal investigator is either the group leader or the department's head (OR = 17.39; p &lt; 0.001), and if the informed consent (OR = 11.79; p = 0.01), and methods and procedures (OR = 34.15; p &lt; 0.001) are well done.ConclusionsThese findings confirm an increase in the number of submissions and a difference in the ratio of applications approved by year. Findings observed also confirm deficiencies in “informed consent” and in “methods and procedures” are the two main causes of delay for favorable ethical opinions. Additionally, findings highlight the need that group leaders and heads of departments should be more involved in guiding and supervising their research teams, especially when research applications are led by less experienced researchers. Based on these findings, it is suggested that an adequate mentoring and targeted training in research could derive in more robust research applications and in smoother ethical review processes.