An Approach for the Development and Implementation of an Assessment Tool for Interprofessional Education Learning Activities

Abstract

The Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education Standards 2016 state that colleges of pharmacy must assess student achievement and readiness to contribute as a member of an interprofessional collaborative patient care team. There are a limited number of assessment tools available to achieve this part of the Standards. The purpose of this Case Study Report is to describe the process that one college of pharmacy took to develop an interprofessional education (IPE) assessment tool to be used for their longitudinal assessment approach for IPE in the didactic portion of the curriculum. Strategies for the development of an assessment tool are provided through three themes: continuous refinement, collaboration and streamlining. Next steps for the implementation of the assessment tool, as well as evaluating its validity and reliability, are discussed.

Inter-Professional Education, Inter-Professional Practice and Team Science: Learning Together; Working Together

“…Collaborative competencies allow the practitioner to understand his role and the roles of other professions, in the team (role clarification). This knowledge is used to help the team establish patient centric management goals (40)(41)(42)(43).…”

“…Faculty in each profession can build on and strategise to contextualise as appropriate. Other institutions may categorise the competencies as common competencies, individual professional competencies and collaborative competencies (39,40). The latter are the ones that IPP teams need to ascribe to.…”

“…The general or common competencies are often outcomes and process driven, relationship focused and strongly linked to learning activities and continuum. These core competencies are necessary to guide professional curricular development of learning approaches and assessment strategies (40). They should provide…”

Assessing the Validity and Reliability of the Pharmacist Interprofessional Competencies Tool

“…15 Efforts have been made to develop an assessment tool that is used across multiple IPE learning activities, provides useful student-level feedback, and tracks student progress in achieving interprofessional competencies. 16 The final assessment tool had to be designed to evaluate students quickly and easily during IPE learning activities. The dimensions of the assessment tool had to be broad enough to cover many IPE learning activities but specific enough to give useful data and feedback.…”

“…A detailed description of the PICT development has been published previously. 16 The PICT had four revisions and three pilottesting phases. We determined that the fourth version would be the final version of the assessment tool and that it should undergo psychometric analysis to establish further measures of validity and reliability.…”