A cross-sectional survey of interprofessional education across 13 healthcare professions in Japan

Abstract

Background: With the rapid aging of the population, collaboration among the various medical professions throughout the country is becoming increasingly indispensable in Japan. To promote collaboration in medical care, it is necessary to introduce the c oncept of collaboration to students at an early stage of their professional education. Despite this need, there are no core medical, healthcare and welfare education curricula in Japan that include interprofessional education (IPE). Therefore, the status of IPE in Japanese schools of medicine and other healthcare-related services is unclear. Methods: We sent 3,430 questionnaires to 13 schools of medicine and related healthcare providers: doctors, nurses, physical therapists, registered dieticians, dentists, dental hygienists, social workers, pharmacists, occupational therapists, clinical psychologists, medical administrators, certified care workers, and speech therapists. The items addressed implementation rate of IPE, teaching methods and grading methods. Results: Of the 3,430 surveys distributed, 572 completed surveys were returned (response rate 17%). Of the completed surveys, 493 qualified as valid, resulting in a final response rate of 14%. Only 19% (n = 93) of the analysed medical educational institutions included IPE instruction in their curricula. Conclusion: While many educational institutions were conducting IPE, there were important inter-institutional differences with respect to attitudes towards IPE, teaching methods, and evaluation methods. This study was unprecedented in scale, and provides important basic information for the future development of IPE in Japan.

Factors for self-assessment score of interprofessional team collaboration in community hospitals in Japan

“…IPC requires that mutual professionals learn expected roles with, from and about each other through prolonged interprofessional communication across many years. Based on their prerequisite education, it is likely that young healthcare professionals may regard superficial sharing of information as IPC,31 32 suggesting that younger healthcare professionals may tend to think that they conduct better IPC than older healthcare professionals. Younger professionals who are motivated to collaborate more within and across organisations may play a critical role in IPC.…”

Interprofessional education in medical schools in Japan

“…Lectures were the most common learning strategy adopted for IPE. A previous Japanese study reported that approximately half of IPE programs were delivered through lectures [16]. However, in our study, one-third of IPE programs used didactic lectures without interaction between multi-professional students.…”

“…The survey yielded a high response rate of 79.0%. Response rates in previous studies were low [15, 16]. Previous studies targeted a wide range of medical and healthcare and social professions, and did not have strategies for reminding schools that had not responded to their questionnaires.…”

“…IPE is being promoted in undergraduate education at medical schools in Japan. Surveys on pre-registration IPE programs for medical students in Japan conducted in 2012 [15] and 2013 [16] showed that 34.8% and 37.5% of Japanese medical schools implemented IPE, respectively. Although the settings of these studies differed from those of the present study, our findings suggest that implementation of IPE in Japan is rapidly increasing.…”

“…Two previous studies reported that IPE implementation in medical schools in Japan ranged from only 34.8% [15] to 37.5% [16]. Response rates to these studies were low, however, at 32.5% and 10.0%, respectively.…”