Collaborate and Integrate: Incorporating Client Feedback in Student IPE Clinics

Similar to clinical skills education, interprofessional education (IPE) should occur within classroom/laboratory and clinical settings, to allow students time to practice their collaborative skills in a real-world setting with supervision. The majority of IPE research has focused on measuring student perceptions, knowledge and skills within classroom, simulation, community or clinic settings. However, there remains a gap in client or patient perceptions of students’ abilities to demonstrate interprofessional collaborative practice skills (Umland, et al., 2016).

Occupational and Physical Therapy (OT/PT) students are engaged in an outpatient clinical IPE experience, referred to as the Neurological Clinic (NC). The NC provides students with realistic opportunities to practice clinical skills, such as conducting a history intake, functional assessment tools and interprofessional collaboration. A foundational component of interprofessional collaborative practice is prioritizing and valuing patient-centered care. Elwyn, et al. (2015) and Barr, et al. (2014) developed two patient-reported assessment tools, CollaboRATE and IntegRATE, which provide clinicians feedback on their collaborative behaviors. CollaboRATE inquires about shared decision making during healthcare appointments (Barr, et al., 2014), and IntegRATE asks about the level of healthcare delivery integration by a team (Elwyn, et al., 2015).

In order to enhance student learning as well as assess student interprofessional behaviors from the perspective of the client, faculty and the director of the IPE office incorporated the use of CollaboRATE and IntegRATE into the NC, so that NC participants would have the opportunity to rate the collaborative behaviors of students.

The Lightning Talk will discuss the use of CollaboRATE and IntegRATE within IPE clinical opportunities to provide students with feedback on their collaborative practices as perceived by clients. Further research is needed to determine if results from these assessment tools provide students with relevant feedback to maintain and/or improve interprofessional collaborative behaviors, or can be correlated with student self-reported perceptions.