Promotion of role clarification in the Health Care Team Challenge

Abstract

Interprofessional collaboration has consistently been associated with positive client-care outcomes. Role clarification is one facet of interprofessional collaboration that is thought to be crucial for effective interprofessional team functioning. Given the positive outcomes associated with interprofessional collaboration, educators have begun to integrate formal interprofessional education events into healthcare curricula. The Health Care Team Challenge (HCTC) is a collaborative competition designed to promote interprofessional competencies among students in healthcare fields. The current study empirically investigated whether this event promoted role clarification among participants. Sixteen participants in five healthcare professions (occupational therapy, physiotherapy, clinical psychology, nursing, and medicine) completed two questionnaires to assess role clarification before and after participating in this event. Results indicate that participants' understanding of their own and other professions' roles improved after participating in this team activity. These results suggest that the HCTC is effective in promoting role clarification and collaboration among healthcare students.

Knowledge about and Attitudes of Interdisciplinary Team Members toward Occupational Therapy Practice: Implications and Future Directions

“…Therefore, as suggested by Alotaibi et al [18], it is vital that the Kuwait University incorporates changes within the curricula of its various health-related departments to improve the understanding of knowledge bases and values of these professions. The addition of IPE courses within the health care curricula was also perceived as crucial element internationally [9, 19-22]. It is important, however, to note that the application of IPE in the health care curricula requires practical and structured learning experiences of learning about, from and with other health care students [21, 23].…”

“…Additionally, as a prerequisite to the success of such IPE curricula and to ensure effective collaborative practice among students as well as future health care professionals, they ought to have a clear representation and understanding of their own professional knowledge and values during their interprofessional team functioning [19, 21, 22]. For example, as occupational therapists and physical therapists work closely with each other in various practice settings [25], their professional knowledge and values are not always clear to one another which could result in conflict related to service provision and therefore influence the success of interprofessional collaboration [19].…”

Use of profession-role exchange in an interprofessional student team-based community health service-learning experience

“…There are three underlying factors in RIPLS, which were respectively named as "Team-working and collaboration", "Professional-identity" and "Roles and responsibilities" [21]. Among them, "Roles and responsibilities" subscale of RIPLS has been widely used to specially evaluate the overall role clarification during IPE [12,22]. This subscale includes 3 items rated on a 5-point scale, ranging from (1: strongly Disagree -5: strongly agree).…”

“…However, this previous IPE opportunity only involved medical and pharmacy students. Importantly, it is generally accepted that role clarification in interprofessional collaboration requires real experience with other professions in team environments [12]. In an effort to improve our existing IPE activity, we further speculated, if some interventions were vividly integrated into the service learning experience in a real community setting, this IPE activity might be more effective and better initiate students to the practice of interprofessional collaboration.…”

Use of profession-role exchange in an interprofessional student team-based community health service-learning experience

“…However, this previous IPE opportunity only involved medical and pharmacy students. Importantly, it is generally accepted that role clari cation in interprofessional collaboration requires real experience with other professions in team environments [18].…”