J. Leslie, MD MSc 1 ; W.V. Norman, MD MHSc 1 ; J. Soon, PhD 2 .

1. 1) http:// Developing Competencies and Attitudes Toward Interprofessional Collaboration: a Reproductive Health Project During Undergraduate Training. J. Leslie, MD MSc1; W.V. Norman, MD MHSc1; J. Soon, PhD2. “teaching students how to work with other types of health providers will deliver the highest quality of care”3 Overall, we found that undergraduate health care students who actively engaged in an interdisciplinary project gained measurable professional competencies. Additionally, our questionnaire results corroborated nicely with our follow-up interviews and essays, validating our tool as a method to measure interprofessional development in undergraduate students. CanMEDS – All of the competencies were self-assessed with higher scores in the post-survey except that of professional, which was marginally lower (Figure 1). We measured significant changes in the competency of health advocate. CIHC – All of the competencies were ranked higher in the post-survey and we measure significant changes in the competencies of interprofessional communication, role clarification, team functioning and collaborative leadership (Figure 2). Attitudes – Few attitudes toward interprofessional work saw statistically significant changes; however, both the survey data trends and the qualitative findings suggested more acceptance of interprofessional collaboration and a more positive attitude to working interprofessionally. Introduction Results The World Health Organization has stated that interprofessional (IP) collaboration is essential worldwide in order to effectively provide care for the many people who are currently under-served by our medical systems1. One way to foster effective, lifelong collaboration is for students from different health-care disciplines to work and learn together during training2. In a recent publication, UBC’s Dean of Medicine stated that it is “increasingly obvious that teaching students how to work with other types of health providers will deliver the highest quality of care.”3 Despite the globally recognized importance of interdisciplinary learning, there is little unity on the best methods to assess the professional outcomes of IP learning projects4,5. There are a multitude of guidelines and frameworks that have been constructed to evaluate professional growth in health care students. For our study, we created and tested a unique tool for assessing interprofessional development in undergraduate students based on published frameworks. It is important to evaluate the professional impact that working collaboratively has on interdisciplinary health care students1. This information may be used to further understand the effect of interprofessional healthcare collaboration during training on future professional performance. “I hope this will open doors to new practices within and amongst our various faculties." ”[The] UBC CARES project was an excellent way to begin understanding interprofessional collaboration.” I “I wish projects like this were mandatory parts of all health care curricula." "interprofessionalism is not as easy to accomplish as it sounds.” Figure 1 – Students working together on the 2010 CARES project. Callouts contain quotes from the follow-up essays. This pilot study demonstrated the effectiveness of measuring attainable outcomes in interprofessional competencies and attitudes in health-care students working collaboratively during training. Our results show some promising trends. Overall, the students ranked themselves higher post-study in most competencies, and these self-assessment scale questionnaires were corroborated by the individual interviews and reflective essay findings. Limitations: small sample size, subjective nature of self-assessments, overwhelming positive pre-test attitudes may reflect sample bias, no blinding, project participants’ gender mix predominantly female. Future: This pilot was a part of a larger project, being completed of several years. This allows us to repeat our testing to obtain a larger sample size to tease out more subtle findings. We believe the measurement tool that we employed and the results of this pilot study will be useful for assessing development of interprofessional attitudes and competencies among health care students in future projects of this kind. Discussion I To create our assessment tool, we chose three published frameworks to assess a broad range of competencies and attitudes in an interprofessional setting: 1) the Canadian Medical Education Determinants (CanMEDS)6, 2) the Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (CIHC) competencies7 and, 3) the Memorial University Interprofessional Attitudes Survey8. The CanMEDS competencies place great emphasis on superior patient care and encompass a holistic ideal of the competencies a practicing medical professional must acquire. They have been used as a standard assessment tool not only in Canada, but also globally9,10 and to a wide array of allied health professionals5. There exists overlap between the CIHC and CanMEDS competencies; however, the CIHC framework specifically defines the skills and traits necessary for effective interprofessional collaboration; thus it is a very useful framework for assessing IP development. Whereas the CIHC and CanMEDS are both competency-based, the Memorial University survey assesses personal attitudes toward working in an interprofessional group. The Assessment Tool "By asking students to engage in the health care system today, they learn and contribute to change for tomorrow.” - John G. Abbott, CEO of the Health Council of Canada. Figure 2 - Competencies from the CanMEDS section of a survey completed among health care students from different disciplines both before and after working on a summer educational project together. Statistically significant changes are marked with an *. Figure 3 - Competencies from the CIHC section of a survey completed among health care students from different disciplines both before and after working on a summer educational project together. Statistically significant changes are marked with an *. References Methods Integration “those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin We assessed a group of nine interdisciplinary students from medicine, midwifery, nursing, and pharmacy who worked together on a summer project called “Computer-Assisted Reproductive health Education for Students (CARES)”. They were creating an educational tool related to contraceptive care and abortion services for use in undergraduate curriculum in the health professions at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. Participants completed a self-evaluation questionnaire before and after the summer project, and following the project, completed a short, semi-structured interview and wrote a reflective essay on the impact of their interprofessional collaboration. Participants self-scored using Likert scales for the questionnaires and we analyzed the data using paired t-tests. 1) World Health Organization (2010). Framework for action on interprofessional education & collaborative practice. Geneva: WHO. 2)Chan and Wood (2010). Preparing Tomorrow's Healthcare Providers for Interprofessional Collaborative Patient-Centered Practice Today. University of British Columbia Medical Journal. Vol 1, Issue 2. 3) UBC Medicine. Stewart, G.C.E.(2010). Message From the Vice Provost Health and Dean. Vol 6, No 1, Pg 3. Vancouver, BC. 4) Thistlethewaite, J and Moran, M. (2010) Learning outcomes for interprofessional education (IPE): Literature review and synthesis. 24(5): 503-513. 5) Verma S., Broers T., Paterson M., Schroder C., Medves J.M., Morrison C. (2009) Core competencies: the next generation. Comparison of a common framework for multiple professions. Journal of Allied Health. 38(1):47-53. 6) Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (2005). The CanMEDS 2005 Physician Competency Framework. Ottawa, ON. http://rcpsc.medical.org/canmeds/CanMEDS2005/index.php 7) Canadian Interprofessional Health Collaborative (2010). A National Interprofessional Competency Framework. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. 8) Attitudes questions adapted from a survey developed by Sharpe D. and Curran V. Centre for Collaborative Health Professional Education, Memorial University, St John's, Newfoundland. 9) Ringsted C., Hansen T.L., Davis D., Scherpbier A. (2006) Are some of the challenging aspects of the CanMEDS roles valid outside Canada? Medical Education. 40(8):807-15. 10) Scheele F. et al. (2008) Introducing competency-based postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. Medical Teacher. 30(3):248-53. 11) World Health Organization: Global Burden of Disease Study.http://www.who.int/inf-pr-1998/en/pr98-86.html 1UBC Faculty of Medicine, Department of Family Practice, 2UBC Pharmaceutical Sciences. This research was supported by an internal UBC grant from the Teaching Learning and Enhancement Fund and was made possible by the infrastructure support of the Women’s Health Research Institute and the Contraception and Abortion Research Team. A special thank you to our passionate group of Interprofessional UBC Students. Acknowledgments