Study description
A total of 60 third-year students (20 medical students, 20 pharmacy students and 20 nursing students; 19 males and 41 females) volunteered to participate in the IPE activity on May 12-13, 2018. They had learned basic disease/drug knowledge and community service skills, and were recruited via the Internet. Faculty organised an interprofessional student team-based local community diabetes self-management education. The involved students were randomly divided into the profession-role exchange intervention group and the control group. Each group was composed of 10 medical students, 10 pharmacy students and 10 nursing students. Two weeks prior to the IPE activity, all the student volunteers were informed about the aim and step of this IPE activity, organized into interprofessional teams during an initial meeting convened by faculty committee. The CONSORT guidelines were followed and the study flowchart is presented in Fig.1.
Step 1 Cooperative learning
Previously, we used cooperative learning based on six-stage model of group investigation to prepare for the subsequent community service learning [7]. The students carried out the cooperative learning in the organized interprofessional teams. Students were arranged to learn and discuss the knowledge and skills, which were required to deliver interprofessional care in the subsequent community service experience, in collaborative small-group learning situations. Moreover, students from different professions were encouraged to offer their own professional opinions about diabetes control, in order to let students from other professions understand their own professional roles and responsibilities. Meanwhile, positive collaborative relationships among the three professions could be built through the reciprocal discussion among team members. On the day before the community service IPE activity, faculty committee convened a formal meeting, in which the students were required to report on their group’s cooperative learning work, present the group community diabetes self-management education project, outline and negotiate all team members’ potential professional contributions.
Step 2 Community service learning
Considering the prevalence of increased incidence of type 2 diabetes among the public, the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system reforms for improving the community health service system have been initiated in response to the challenges of chronic diseases represented by diabetes in China [19]. Accordingly, Chinese health profession students have more opportunities to access to a wide variety of patients with a range of acute to chronic diabetic conditions, and learn professional diabetes-related knowledge and skills in community-based settings. After cooperative learning, the students participated in a community service experience aiming to increase diabetes self-management education. The interprofessional student teams conducted household visits for the community residents suffering from diabetes, the list of whom was given by the community hospital, to educate them about diabetes self-management and address their health-care needs. Each interprofessional student team included 2 medical students, 2 pharmacy students and 2 nursing students. Each group (profession-role exchange intervention group or the control group) included 5 teams to visit the household. The responsibilities of health-care students from different professions were proposed and assigned based on the clinical practice and the Standards for Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support [20](Fig. 1).
Intervention Profession-role exchange
On the days the local community diabetes self-management education IPE activity was conducted, in the intervention group, the profession-role exchange experiences were used to further enhance the role awareness of health-care students. As a kind of role-playing education game, profession-role exchange is an innovative simulation- based experiential learning method, in which health-care students from different professions play one another's role in an environment similar to the clinical environment. This new role experience may help students to develop awareness and valuing of the future collaborating team members’ potential contributions in providing effective patient care, as well as objectively view their own role from the perspective of partners. During the community diabetes self-management education IPE activity (Step 2), students in the intervention group were required to perform the responsibilities of the students from other professions. That is, one medical student in a team should perform the responsibilities of the pharmacy students in their team; the other medical student should play the role of the partner nursing students in their team. And one pharmacy student in this team should act as a student physician; the other pharmacy student should adopt characters or roles of the nursing students in their team, and so on. The role-choices of students were based on their own will and the negotiation among the team members. As students began the role-exchange experiences, they were allowed to consult with their peers, but could not let other students work instead of themselves.
Subjects in the control group did not participate the profession-role exchange experiences, the other IPE procedures (Step 1 and 2) were the same for both groups. The above IPE experience was governed by a volunteer faculty committee, and under the supervision of three qualified practitioners.
Measures
Physician-pharmacist collaboration survey instrument
As common-used validated instrument for measuring interprofessional collaboration between physicians and pharmacists [7,21], Scale of Attitudes Toward Physician-Pharmacist Collaboration (SATP2C) was applied to measure the perceptions of physician-pharmacist collaboration among the involved medical and pharmacy students. There are 16 Likert-type items on a 4-point scale ( 4:strongly agree; 3:agree; 2: disagree or 1:strongly disagree) in SATP2C. Higher scores mean more positive attitudes toward physician-pharmacist collaborative relationships.
Physician-nurse collaboration survey instrument
The medical and nursing students in both intervention and control groups were required to complete the Jefferson Scale of Attitudes Towards Physician-Nurse Collaboration (JSAPNC) [22], which included 15 items on a 4-point scale (1:strongly disagree-4:strongly agree). A higher total score indicates a more positive attitude toward physician–nurse collaboration.
Nurse-pharmacist collaboration survey instrument
The attitudes toward nurse–pharmacist collaboration among the nursing and pharmacy students were analyzed using a previously self-developed 25-item scale [23], the overall score of which ranges from 25 to 100 theoretically. Higher scores reflect more positive attitudes toward nurse-pharmacist collaboration.
“Roles and responsibilities” subscale of Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS)
All the participant students were asked for responses to “Roles and responsibilities” subscale of RIPLS, which was firstly developed by Parsell & Bligh [24] to assess the readiness of health-care students for multi-professional learning. There are three underlying factors in RIPLS, which were respectively named as “Team-working and collaboration”, “Professional-identity” and “Roles and responsibilities” [25]. Among them, “Roles and responsibilities” subscale of RIPLS has been widely used to specially evaluate the overall role clarification during IPE [18,26]. This subscale includes 3 items rated on a 5-point scale, ranging from (1: strongly Disagree - 5: strongly agree). Higher total scores indicate greater role clarification.
The bilingual version of the above survey instruments in Chinese and English was applied in this study to ensure the accurate comprehension of respondents.
Data collection
At the initial meeting before beginning the IPE intervention, students received a letter of information and the printed questionnaires. Only participants completing the questionnaires were included in the subsequent study. Participants received the same questionnaires immediately following the community service-learning experience. All 60 students completed the pre-study questionnaires, but a medical student in the profession-role exchange intervention group and a nursing student in control group did not complete the post-study questionnaires thus were excluded from analyses.
Data analysis
Data were coded and entered into SPSS22.0. Results were expressed as mean ± standard deviation (SD). Previous studies have identified underlying factors of SATP2C [21], JSAPNC [22], Nurse-pharmacist collaboration survey instrument [23], and RIPLS[24] (Table 1-3, Fig.2). In order to assess the levels of attitudes toward interprofessional collaboration or role clarification and their distribution among different factors, total scores from survey instruments as well as the scores for each extracted factor were recorded. The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed rank test was used to compare the differences between the results from pre- and post-study surveys. Repeated-measures ANOVA using pre- and post-intervention scores as the within-subject factor and intervention (yes or no) as the between-subject factor was conducted to investigate the differences between the outcomes of the profession-role exchange intervention group and the control group. Differences were considered to be statistically significant when p-value < 0.05.