Healthcare students' views on collaboration: An evaluation of a pilot online inter-professional project at NUI Galway

Background: Inter-professional education (IPE) and collaborative practice have emerged as requirements of healthcare professional education to promote optimal patient care. How best to implement IPE is a major challenge. Large... [ view full abstract ]

Background: Inter-professional education (IPE) and collaborative practice have emerged as requirements of healthcare professional education to promote optimal patient care. How best to implement IPE is a major challenge. Large student numbers and difficulties synchronising timetables are barriers to implementation. Online courses provide one opportunity to develop inter-professional collaborations across academic programs. This study reports on a six week online course, using the Values Exchange (VX) system which enabled students to learn through case discussion.
Aims and Objectives: To evaluate students’ perspectives on collaborative learning following an online IPE course.

Method: A mixed methods study was conducted. Focus groups with 47 students were initially undertaken and from this a 34 item evaluation questionnaire was designed. The survey was then distributed to 166 healthcare students who participated on the course. The survey was available both online and in hard copy as some students were away from campus on placements at the time of distribution. A subset of questions (n=11) focusing on collaborative learning was the focus of this study. Descriptive analysis was utilised in this study. Ethical approval was provided by the Ethics Committee at NUI Galway.

Findings: 122 responses (Nursing: n=71; Medicine: n=22; Occupational Therapy: n=21; Speech and Language Therapy: n=7; Social Care: n=1) were received (RR=73%). Most students agreed or strongly agreed that the online IPE course made them think more about their values and how these can influence inter-professional practice (78.5%) and about the perspective of their discipline and how this perspective can impact on collaborative practice (79.3%). Nursing students, who were the largest represented cohort, rated their collaborative learning experience lower than the other healthcare students.

Conclusion and Implications: Most participants in this online IPE course confirmed that they experienced an opportunity to engage in collaborative learning with students from other healthcare disciplines, which impacted collaborative learning. Nursing students rated their collaborative learning less favourably than other healthcare student groups, likely due to the discrepancies in participation across disciplines, therefore modifications are necessary to enhance the programme to facilitate collaborative learning across all disciplines.