Stimulating Students' Interprofessional Teamwork Skills Through Community-Based Education: A Mixed Methods Evaluation

Comparison of Medical Students' Peer Evaluation and Teaching Staff Evaluation of Community Health Projects: Perceptions and Experiences

Background

Public health education increasingly emphasizes experiential learning and community engagement. Peer review complements traditional staff evaluation, enhancing learning outcomes and refining teaching strategies. This study aims to investigate the perceptions and experiences of medical students with peer evaluation of community health projects. Staff evaluation for the same projects will be used for comparison.

Methods

A cross-sectional survey study involving medical students from the epidemiology and community health course at the College of Medicine, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU). Students assessed their peers' community health projects using a self-administered questionnaire. Staff evaluations were also compared. Data was analyzed by IBM SPSS 29.

Results

The study included 187 participants, primarily medical students (98.3%), who evaluated 20 community health projects. Three teaching staff members also rated the same projects. Medical students ranked effort expended (4.34), topic importance (4.26), and apparent participation (4.26) in descending order of value. The Staff evaluated the topic's relevance as the highest (4.43), but they rated the tools as lower (3.9). Medical students ranked tools sufficiency significantly higher, with a mean of (4.16 vs 3.90) than Staff (p <0.05). Both groups evaluated the project's level of innovation and the clarity of its target audience in a comparable manner. The analysis of the Full Project Level indicated no substantial disparity between medical students and Staff, as evidenced by the p-value of 0.920.

Conclusion

This study validates that peer evaluation of student projects is equally practical as evaluation conducted by faculty members. Consequently, allocating resources toward enhancing peer students' learning and evaluation capabilities is justifiable.

Perception of nursing students on nursing teamwork in hospitals in Slovakia: a cross-sectional study

OBJECTIVES

To investigate how undergraduate nursing students perceive teamwork among nurses during their most recent clinical placement and to identify factors that can affect their teamwork perception.

METHODS

The descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out between September 2022 and February 2023 using the Slovak version of the Nursing Teamwork Survey (NTS) tool and included 749 undergraduate nursing students.

RESULTS

The average NTS score was 3.32 (SD=0.43) and significantly associated with academic year, perceived staff adequacy, clinical supervision and learning expectations, hours per week, number of patients per shift, and number of students per shift (p<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

The study underscores the importance of understanding teamwork dynamics from the perspective of undergraduate nursing students.

The effects of community-based education programs on empathy, emotional intelligence, and caring behaviors among nursing students: a scoping review

Introduction

Community-based learning approaches are gaining recognition in nursing education as a means to address the needs of aging societies by fostering empathy, emotional intelligence, and caring behaviors among nursing students. These attributes are essential for enhancing the quality of care and building strong interpersonal connections with older adults. While community-based education programs offer promising benefits, there is still limited understanding of their impact on nursing students' empathy, emotional intelligence, and caring behaviors. This scoping review aims to examine how community-based educational interventions can assist nursing students in developing these essential competencies, ultimately contributing to better outcomes in geriatric care.

Method

A scoping review was conducted following the framework of Arksey and O'Malley. The following electronic databases were searched: Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), MEDLINE, Web of Science, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Gray literature was also searched through Google Scholar and ProQuest. Studies included reports on nursing students' emotional changes due to educational engagements with older adults.

Results

A total of 3,001 abstracts were screened, with 78 full texts reviewed, resulting in 9 studies being included in the analysis. The results demonstrate that interactions with older adults enhance nursing students' empathy and emotional intelligence while fostering positive changes in their caring behaviors. Participants reported greater sensitivity to the feelings and physical discomforts of older adults, contributing to improved care and stronger relational dynamics.

Discussion

Community-based education programs involving older adults represent an effective strategy for enhancing nursing students' empathy, emotional intelligence, and caring behaviors, suggesting valuable implications for nursing education methodologies.

Exploring the "led" in health professional student-led experiences: a scoping review

To support a complex health system, students are expected to be competent leaders as well as competent clinicians. Intentional student leadership development is needed in health professional education programs. Student-led experiences such as student-run clinics and interprofessional training wards, are practice-based learning opportunities where learners provide leadership to clinical services and/or address a gap in the system. Given the absence of leadership definitions and concepts, this scoping review explored how student leadership is conceptualized and developed in student-led experiences. The review was conducted in accordance with best practices in scoping review methodology within the scope of relevant practice-based student-led experiences for health professional students. The research team screened 4659 abstracts, identified 315 articles for full-text review and selected 75 articles for data extraction and analysis. A thematic analysis produced themes related to leadership concepts/theories/models, objectives, facilitation/supervision, assessment and evaluation of curriculum. While responding to system gaps within health professional care, student-led experiences need to align explicit leadership theory/concepts/models with curricular objectives, pedagogy, and assessments to support health professional education. To support future student-led experiences, authors mapped five leadership student role profiles that were associated with student-led models and could be constructively aligned with theory and concepts. In addition to leveraging a student workforce to address system needs, student-led experiences must also be a force for learning through a reciprocal model of leadership and service to develop future health professionals and leaders.

The effectiveness of community-based interprofessional education for undergraduate medical and health promotion students

BACKGROUND

Community-based interprofessional education (CBIPE) has been proven effective in enhancing the interprofessional competencies of medical and health professional students. However, there is a lack of evaluation on the impact of experiential CBIPE among undergraduate medical and health promotion students in Thailand. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess the influence of CBIPE learning on the collaborative competencies of these students.

METHODS

A one-group pre-posttest design in 193 (152 medical students and 41 health promotion) students were involved in the CBIPE program, later divided into 12 groups. Data was collected by direct observations of mentors using the Interprofessional Collaborative Competencies Attainment Survey (ICCAS). The Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the CBIPE program.

RESULTS

A total of 175 (90.67%) completed ICCAS and satisfaction questions before and after the CBIPE program. The mean age of respondents was 20.29 ± 1.63 years; 60.57% were women and 39.43% were men. The results showed a significant increase in collaborative competencies before and after the 2-week course. Gender-stratified analysis showed an improvement after CBIPE training for all subscales in women, while the communication, collaboration, conflict management, and functioning team skills segment score was significantly higher in the post-assessment among men.

CONCLUSION

The implementation of CBIPE learning was successful in enhancing collaborative competencies among both medical and health promotion students. These findings will provide valuable insights for the design and improvement of CBIPE learning programs in other universities.

Community-engaged medical education is a way to develop health promoters: A comparative study

BACKGROUND

Although the importance of health promotion and empowerment of the community has been recognized for many years, there are still many barriers to adopting health promotion in the world. One of the solutions is socially accountable medical education and community engagement.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to compare the medical programs of five medical schools that practiced community-engaged medical education to medical education in Iran.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This comparative study has been performed in 2022 by the four-stage Bereday method, including description (the educational programs of the selected medical schools were examined), interpretation (a validated checklist was prepared according to community-based strategies), proximity (similar and different information was identified), and comparison (solutions were recommended to improve health promotion and community engagement in Iran's medical education program. The purposive sampling method was used to select five universities.

RESULTS

Although successful initiatives have been attempted to integrate public health promotion and community orientation into the Iranian curriculum, they do not appear to be sufficient in comparison to leading countries. The main distinction is that the community is actively engaged in all stages of curriculum design, implementation, and evaluation.

CONCLUSIONS

Although Iran's medical education program has a long way to go in terms of social accountability, by including more community-oriented initiatives into the curriculum, health needs of the community can be met and physician shortages in poor areas can be alleviated. It is recommended to implement modern teaching methods, to recruit diverse faculty and community members, and to increase the community placement in medical education.

Dental student perceptions of teamwork during a community-engaged interprofessional learning experience

INTRODUCTION

Dental professionals have been strong advocates for interprofessional education (IPE). During PFF, students in diverse, interprofessional teams of four are assigned a local volunteer family during their first academic year. Teams conduct four home visits and implement a health improvement project focused on the family's health and well-being. The purpose of our analysis was to examine dental student perspectives on the use of teamwork skills during this unique interprofessional educational experience.

METHODS AND MATERIALS

Dental student responses from 2017 to 2018 and 2018 to2019 were qualitatively analysed. Open coding by hand was used to identify keywords and themes. The themes and open codes were compared and contrasted by the researchers until a consensus was reached on themes.

RESULTS

Researchers discerned three meta-themes: value, skills and time. Researchers also found eight sub-themes prevalent in responses: teamwork, adaptability, mutual support, trust, interprofessional communication, time, feedback, coordination and accountability.

DISCUSSION

Our findings indicate dental students understood the importance of interprofessional teamwork and experiential learning within the context of PFF. Students communicated an understanding of how teamwork skills can impact team-oriented outcomes. Dental students seemed to value many teamwork skills that contributed to their interprofessional team's success and experiential learning experience.

CONCLUSION

Engagement in a longitudinal experience that is patient-centred, requiring time outside of the classroom, is valued by dental students for its interprofessional collaborative competency development.

Does Online Interprofessional Case-Based Learning Facilitate Collaborative Knowledge Construction?

Introduction

COVID-19 pandemic has caused an impact on various sectors of life, including the education sector. During the COVID-19 pandemic, education from various levels could only be carried out online by utilizing various on-line media. In Health professional education context, one of the learning activities that must be shifted in online format was interprofessional education (IPE) program. This study aimed to evaluate students' collaborative knowledge construction to evaluate the effectiveness of online interprofessional case-based learning (CBL) activities.

Methods

This interventional study using quantitative and qualitative method involved a total of 476 students; consisted of 204 medical students, 39 midwifery students and 233 nursing students; who took part online interprofessional CBL. All students were divided into 34 mixed profession groups with 14 students each. To evaluate students' collaborative knowledge construction during CBL, data were collected using the Maastricht Peer Activity Rating Scale (MPARS). Qualitative data exploring students' perception regarding online IPE activity and their online CBL process were collected using Focus Group Discussion (FGD). Quantitative data were analysed using statistical tests, and the qualitative data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Results

Students' scores for constructive, collaborative, and motivational activities evaluated using MPARS were considered as average to high. However, nursing students scored the lowest compared to the other two fellow professions: medical and midwifery students, on all items of the MPARS. Medical students had the highest MPARS scores. Several themes could be explored during the FGD.

Discussion

This study revealed that students could engage in collaborative knowledge construction in interprofessional education implementing online interprofessional CBL. However, students thought that offline collaborative practice will better improve team bonding which is considered as prominent aspect for collaboration. This thought gives idea to the implementation of hybrid online offline learning for IPE.

Exploring the social accountability challenges of nursing education system in Iran

BACKGROUND

Nursing education in Iran is one of the disciplines of medical sciences and it needs a design tailored to the community needs in terms of theoretical and clinical approaches. This system is currently faced with various challenges. This study aims to explore the challenges of Iranian nursing education system to address community needs.

METHODS

A study was carried out through an exploratory descriptive qualitative design with content analysis method. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 participants from the nursing society, selected through purposive sampling. The interviews were continued until data saturation. Data analysis was performed simultaneous with data collection by using Graneheim & Lundman approach.

RESULTS

Based on the interviews and simultaneous analyses, a total of 471 codes, 14 subcategories, six main categories, and two themes were extracted. The first theme, "system structure," consisted of three categories: "the need for ongoing revision of curriculum," "the need to recruit qualified students," and "the need for a proportionate educational environment." The second theme was "the education process" with three categories "the need for purposive educational design," "the need for purposive monitoring and feedback," and "the need for appropriate and early interaction with the community." The participants emphasized the continuous revision of the educational curriculum based on the current needs of the community and community-based nursing education.

CONCLUSIONS

In general, the results showed that Iranian nursing education system is faced with many challenges in the educational system structure and processes. It is necessary to make appropriate plans to enhance the status of the educational system structure and develop educational designs to address community needs using a hospital/community-based approach.

Undergraduate nursing students' self-reported professional behaviour at the University of Namibia

Background

Development of professional behaviour in nursing students is an important part of a nurse’s overall competence. Self-evaluation is one way of measuring professional behaviour amongst nursing students. However, studies on self-reported professional behaviour of nursing students are limited in Namibia.

Aim

This study aimed to investigate nursing students’ self-reported professional behaviour at the University of Namibia.

Setting

The setting was a university campus offering a Bachelor of Nursing Science degree in Namibia.

Methods

A quantitative descriptive contextual design was used with 100 nursing students. Data were analysed descriptively using a non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis and ANOVA tests of variance and statistical significance.

Results

High mean scores were found in the areas of utilising evidence-based solutions (4.78 ± 0.58), promoting clinical teaching (4.46 ± 0.94), willingness to implement quality improvement initiatives (4.34 ± 0.518), and protecting health, safety and patient’s rights (4.28 ± 0.55). The lowest mean scores were recorded in projecting professional image (2.22 ± 1.27), rendering evidence-based care (4.08 ± 0.44). The study found statistical significance difference between self-reported professional competency (p = 0.01) and quality care improvements (p = 0.02).

Conclusion

In this study, nursing students’ self-reported professional behaviour was rated high (mean scores > 4.0 out of 5). Despite this high rating, it cannot be concluded that the students were professionally competent. We recommend that professional behaviour be measured from both students’ and nurse educators’ or patients’ perspectives.

Contribution

The findings from this study provide supplementary evidence on self-reported professional behaviour with implications on nursing education and practice.

Effect of community-based education on undergraduate nursing students' skills: a systematic review

Background

Community-based education, as an effective approach to strengthen nurses’ skills in response to society’s problems and needs has increased in nursing education programs. The aim of this study was to review the effect of community-based education on nursing students’ skills.

Methods

For this systematic review, ProQuest, EMBASE, Scopus, PubMed/ MEDLINE, Cochran Library, Web of Science, CINAHL and Google Scholar were searched up to February 2021. The methodological quality of the studies was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT). Seventeen studies were included in this systematic review. Inclusion criteria included articles published in English and were original articles.

Results

In all studies, undergraduate nursing students’ skills were improved by participation in a community-based education program. Community-based education enhances professional skills, communication skills, self-confidence, knowledge and awareness, and critical thinking skills and teamwork skills in undergraduate nursing students.

Conclusions

Community-based education should be used as an effective and practical method of training capable nurses to meet the changing needs of society, to improve nurses ‘skills and empower them to address problems in society.