Do commencing nursing and paramedicine students differ in interprofessional learning and practice attitudes: evaluating course, socio-demographic and individual personality effects

Abstract

BackgroundInterprofessional education (IPE) requires health students to learn with, from and about each other in order to develop a modern workforce with client-centred care at its core. Despite the client centred focus of IPE, training programs often utilize standard approaches across student cohorts without consideration of discipline, sociodemographic and personality variability that attract students to different health disciplines. Knowing the students who engage in IPE to tailor training may prove as beneficial as knowing the client to delivered individualized client centred care in interprofessional practice (IPP). This research investigates whether students commencing undergraduate nursing and paramedicine degrees ener training with existing demographic and personality differences and, if these are associated with different attitudes towards health care teams and interprofessional education.MethodThis online study recruited 160 nursing and 50 paramedicine students in their first week of their undergraduate course. Students completed questionnaires regarding their background, personality (General Perceived Self Esteem Scale, International Mini Markers) and the attitudes towards health care teams scale (ATHCTS) and interprofessional education perception scale (IEPS).ResultsResults show that commencing nursing and paramedicine students are demographically different on education, gender, speaking a language other than English at home (LOTE) and their own experience with healthcare. The results further demonstrate that LOTE, discipline being studied and personality factors play a role in perceptions regarding interprofessional training whilst discipline being studied impacted on attitudes towards health care teams in the workforce.ConclusionThese results highlight a number of existing personal and psychological differences between individuals who choose to train in these selected professions. This suggests a need for tertiary education IPE programs to move towards tailoring their education to value this student diversity in the same client centred manner that students are asked to develop clinically.

Nursing Students Learn Online Interprofessional Education on Substance Use

“…Internal consistency of the scale is 0.80 (Luecht, Madsen, Taugher, & Petterson, 1990), and the reliability of individual subscales has ranged from 0.40 to 0.80. The IEPS is a tool that is frequently used to measure students' perceptions of interprofessional practice and has been used in different countries: Australia (Hallam et al, 2016;Williams & Webb, 2013) and Canada (Solomon & Salfi, 2011;Tsang, Cheung, & Sakakibara, 2016).…”

The personality of past, present and future speech–language pathology students*

“…The Big Five has been extensively used in nursing research (Hallam et al 2016). Research has highlighted the important role of personality in quality of effort, critical thinking and performance levels in university students (Bauer and Liang 2003).…”

Development of clinical and inter-personal skills to support people living with dementia

“…This initiative found divergence in the outcomes experienced by nursing and paramedic students as to the value of such programmes (Hallam, et al 2016). The divergence was further amplified as paramedic students viewed themselves as separate and not part of the wider health care system as most care occurs within hospital or community settings (Williams, & Webb, 2015).…”