The impact of an interprofessional problem‐based learning curriculum of clinical ethics on medical and nursing students' attitudes and ability of interprofessional collaboration: A pilot study

Abstract

Clinical ethic situations in modern multiprofessional healthcare systems may involve different healthcare professions who work together for patient care. The undergraduate interprofessional education of clinical ethics would help to incubate healthcare students' ability of interprofessional collaboration in solving ethical problems. However, the impact from an interprofessional educational model on student's attitudes and confidence of interprofessional collaboration should be carefully evaluated during the process of curricular development. This study aimed to conduct a pilot interprofessional PBL curriculum of clinical ethics and evaluate the curricular impact on interprofessional students' attitude and confidence of collaborative teamwork. Thirty-six medical and nursing students volunteered to participate in this study and were divided into three groups (medical group, nursing group, and mixed group). Tutors were recruited from the Medical School and the College of Nursing. The pilot curriculum included one lecture of clinical ethics, one PBL case study with two tutorial sessions, and one session of group discussion and feedback. A narrative story with multiple story lines and a multiperspective problem analysis tool were used in the PBL tutorials. The students' self-evaluation of learning questionnaire was used to evaluate students' learning of clinical ethics and interprofessional collaborative skills and attitude. The internal consistency of the questionnaire was measured by Cronbach α, and the criterion-related validity of the questionnaire was evaluated through associations between the dimension scores with the student group by one-way analysis of variance test (ANOVA) test and Tukey-Kramer honestly significant difference (HSD) comparison. There was significant difference among different groups in students' ability and attitudes about "interprofessional communication and collaboration" (p = 0.0184). The scores in the mixed group (37.58 ± 3.26) were higher than the medical group (32.10 ± 4.98). In conclusion, our model for the interprofessional PBL curriculum of clinical ethics is practicable and will produce positive impacts on students' attitudes and confidence of interprofessional collaboration.

The Pattern of Intragroup Conflict and Group Performance during Interprofessional Teamwork Process among Students of Medical and Health Professionals

“…It indicated that medical students were accustomed to work in teams attributable to the medical program implemented problem based learning (PBL) since the first year, while the other disciplines applied lecture-based learning in large classroom. This evidence supported previous studies that the ability to cooperate formed through a continual process and PBL had developed students' ability to resolve conflicts within the team, developing a good group process, and better to adapt on different professional behavior in an interprofessional team [16].…”

Interprofessional Communication (IPC) for Medical Students: A Scoping Review

“…Students reported self-perceived improvement in IPC and the increased ability to adapt different communication styles in future practices (2,15,51,52,55,59,65,69,75,77,78,80,81,83,86,101,106,115,116).…”

Interprofessional Clinical Ethics Education: The Promise of Cross-Disciplinary Problem-Based Learning

“…While the findings reported by Lin and colleagues [18] suggest that a problem-based interprofessional learning curriculum can positively impact nursing and medical students' attitudes toward and confidence in interprofessional collaboration, several limitations are noteworthy besides the small sample size. First, the authors fail to provide robust details of the PBL curriculum intervention, which limits the replication of findings.…”

“…In 2013, Lin and colleagues piloted an interprofessional problembased learning (PBL) curriculum in clinical ethics education to evaluate students' attitudes and confidence when performing collaborative teamwork [18]. Thirty-six nursing and medical students in Taiwan were recruited and randomly divided into three groups (nursing group, medical group, and cross-disciplinary group).…”