The impact of interprofessional education on students' current and desired competence in diabetes care

Abstract

Aim To explore the impact of interprofessional education (IPE) on undergraduate nursing and medical students' knowledge, competence and targeted competence in diabetes care. Design Mixed methods design. Methods A voluntary IPE course of diabetes management was organized for nursing (n = 15) and medical (n = 15) students, who performed a diabetes knowledge test and self‐evaluation of diabetes competence before and after the course and were compared with non‐participating students. The participating students' focus‐group interviews were analysed using inductive content analysis. Results The IPE course improved nursing students' diabetes knowledge and self‐evaluated competence among nursing and medical students. The baseline differences in self‐evaluated competence between the groups disappeared. The non‐participating students evaluated their competence higher than the participants, though they scored lower or equally in the knowledge test. In conclusion, IPE showed potential in increasing students' self‐evaluated competence, motivation to learn more and nursing students' diabetes knowledge, offering better prospects for future interprofessional diabetes management.

Undergraduate Interprofessional Education in the European Higher Education Area: A Systematic Review

“…These included peer-assisted learning [30,36,59], Jeffries simulation theory [55], Bandura self-efficacy theory [46], Knowles's principles for Adult Learning as guidelines [53], goal theory perspective [59], model of inter-professionality, Beck's cognitive model, and social capital theory [56]. The remaining papers did not explicitly mention the theoretical background of the IPE program [29,[31][32][33][34][35][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][47][48][49][50][51][52]54,57,58,60].…”

“…With respect to the content, the learners were introduced to interprofessional collaborations via exposure to examples of interprofessional care of patients with specific clinical conditions (e.g., wound, ulcers, dementia, diabetes, and breast cancer) in actual setting or in simulation scenarios [31][32][33]35,45,50,51,54,60]. Nine papers reported that the content of the IPE intervention included explicit training on the different professional roles [29,32,[34][35][36]51,54,56,57], and seven papers reported IPE interventions that included training in communication skills [30,32,35,36,40,49,57].…”

“…Several studies (n = 16) included students from two professions only [29,31,32,37,40,42,43,45,48,[52][53][54][55][56][57][58]. In addition to medical students, twenty-three studies included nursing, six papers included physiotherapy, four papers included pharmacology, and only two papers included psychology students (Table 1).…”

“…The authors reported several limitations in their studies, from a lack of objective outcome measures [30,32,33,35,41,[46][47][48]51,53,54,57,59,60] to the selection bias of the participants [29,31,33,36,38,39,43,48,54,55,59], and lack of control groups [30,32,43,49]. A description of the limitations is provided in Table 1.…”

“…The IPE interventions reported in the retrieved papers are heterogeneous in terms of content and assessment measures. Specifically, the content varies from interprofessional collaboration needed for caring for patients with specific clinical conditions [35,45,54] to understanding professional roles, communication skills, and teamwork in general healthcare interprofessional settings [36,55]. All findings fell in the first two levels of Kirkpatrick's four-level outcome model [61].…”