Search

Future healthcare professionals are educated on collaborative practice methods through interventions that may include shadowing. While shadowing allows students to learn from and about other health professions, it often fails to offer an opportunity for the student to work and collaborate with other health professionals. This study sought to investigate themes regarding interprofessional students' experiences during a palliative care shadowing activity and their understanding of collaborative patient-centered care, social determinants of health, and health disparities. Twenty-eight students representing 13 health professions from the Interprofessional Palliative Care program at Jefferson Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at Thomas Jefferson University submitted reflection essays at the conclusion of their shadowing experience. Four hundred ninety-eight sentences from 28 essays were analyzed via qualitative directed content analysis. Coding categories were determined a priori using definitions of collaborative practice from the 2023 Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) competencies and definitions of social determinants of health from Healthy People 2030. Thirty-two percent of sentences described IPEC competencies, 18% described social determinants of health/ health disparities, 4% included student emotional reactions, and 2% included student descriptions of the development of their professional role. These results suggest that shadowing offers an opportunity to identify and learn interprofessional competencies in interprofessional palliative care curricula, as made evident through student reflection assignments., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Modern healthcare increasingly requires interprofessional teams to collaborate both in person and virtually to effectively achieve common goals. To prepare students for interprofessional collaborative practice (CP) universities need evaluation tools that can validly and reliably measure students' CP competencies after online and in-person interprofessional education. The Jefferson Teamwork Observation Guide® (JTOG) is a 360-degree evaluation tool previously validated to measure nationally-defined CP competencies. The psychometrics of the Individual JTOG have been examined in a sample of interprofessional healthcare students after online interprofessional education. The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Individual JTOG in 709 students after in-person interprofessional education using Rasch Modeling and compared results across collaborative settings and student professions. Results indicated that item and person statistics, unidimensionality, scaling performance, and local independence of the Individual JTOG were comparable between online and in-person samples, suggesting it is consistent in its measurement of CP competencies across collaborative settings. Psychometric properties were strong, but ceiling effects were present. Minor deviations were found in the Individual JTOG's unidimensionality between professional groups. The Values and Ethics construct was more strongly separated from others for nursing than other health professions. Recommendations for future research and possible adaptations to the instrument are discussed.