Health professional education programs increasingly incorporate interprofessional education (IPE) activities into curricula in response to evolving health policy and accreditation requirements in an effort to highlight the benefits of, and prepare students for, interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). As such, there is a need for statistically valid instruments designed to assess baseline student perceptions regarding IPE and IPCP. Using confirmatory factor analysis, this study compared the reliability and construct validity of a revised 21-item Attitudes Toward Health Care Teams (ATHCT-R) instrument and a 10-item Student Perceptions of Interprofessional Clinical Education-Revised (SPICE-R) instrument. The instruments were concurrently administered online and completed by a total of 221 first year nursing, optometry, pharmacy, physical therapy, and health administration students. In this study, the SPICE-R exhibited better performance in terms of goodness of fit, construct validity, and reliability compared with the ATHCT-R. The SPICE-R instrument demonstrates promise as a parsimonious, valid, and reliable tool for measuring health professional students' perceptions of IPE and IPCP.

Objective. To refine the Student Perceptions of Physician-Pharmacist Interprofessional Clinical Education (SPICE) instrument to address deficiencies observed in previous studies and to demonstrate external validity and reliability of the refined instrument in a broad population of medical and pharmacy students. Methods. The original SPICE instrument plus four pilot items generated via cognitive interviewing of students was administered to 1708 medical and pharmacy students at five academic institutions. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify candidate model structures and evaluate their psychometric properties.Results. An improved version of the instrument was created (SPICE 2) by incorporating three pilot items and removing three original items. Validity and reliability were demonstrated. Conclusion. The SPICE 2 instrument addresses the limitations observed to date in model structure while increasing its utility. The authors recommend use of the SPICE 2 instrument moving forward.

Local health agencies in Iowa were surveyed to assess the performance of public health practices in their communities. Responses were received from 97 percent of counties. Less than 50 percent of counties were performing half of the indicators of the Assessment function. Policy Development functions also were frequently not performed. Performance was best in the Assurance function, with 86 percent of counties reporting that they inform and educate the public. However, the other three types of Assurance practices (Manage, Implement, and Evaluate) were performed less frequently. Comparison of the performance of Iowa's rural counties reveals a profile nearly identical to that reported elsewhere for a group of six other states.

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