Quality assurance in allied healthcare education: A narrative review

Professional Identity Formation in Allied Health: A Systematic Review with Narrative Synthesis

Phenomenon: Professional identity formation is a key component of health professional education. Changing expectations of healthcare requires more than competencies, but also an ingrained responsibility to patients, with our values and behaviors aligned with community expectations of patient-centered health professionals. Research into professional identity formation has focused on nursing and medical training, and, although allied health professionals make up one third of the workforce, research is uneven across these disciplines. Health professions educators from these under-researched disciplines have less guidance for how to support students' professional identity, meaning students may graduate with less mature professional identities. This systematic literature review synthesizes the research on professional identity formation across nine similar allied health disciplines. The purpose is to guide health professions educators in the formation of professional identity in allied health students. Approach: We carried out a systematic literature review, registered on Prospero, following the PRIMSA framework, to find, appraise, and synthesize research on professional identity for nine allied health professions. We synthesized extracted data using a narrative synthesis with convergent qualitative meta-integration of qualitative and quantitative data. Results: Our database searches combined with ancestry and forward searching resulted in 70 studies that met inclusion criteria. Studies came from 17 countries, from seven of the included disciplines (art therapy, dietetics, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, podiatry, psychology, and speech pathology) and from undergraduate, postgraduate, and new graduate perspectives. We found professional identity was influenced by the places of learning (curriculum and clinical experiences or placements), interactions with people (relationships with academics, peers, supervisors, patients,and role models), and educational practices engaged (dialogue, reflection, processing challenges), each acting on the individual person (student or new graduate) who also brought unique characteristics and experiences. Insights: This model of influences can inform health professions education to enable students to develop and graduate with a stronger professional identity formation.

Practical Recommendations for Navigating Digital Tools in Hospitals: Qualitative Interview Study

BACKGROUND

The digitalization of health care organizations is an integral part of a clinician's daily life, making it vital for health care professionals (HCPs) to understand and effectively use digital tools in hospital settings. However, clinicians often express a lack of preparedness for their digital work environments. Particularly, new clinical end users, encompassing medical and nursing students, seasoned professionals transitioning to new health care environments, and experienced practitioners encountering new health care technologies, face critically intense learning periods, often with a lack of adequate time for learning digital tools, resulting in difficulties in integrating and adopting these digital tools into clinical practice.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to comprehensively collect advice from experienced HCPs in Switzerland to guide new clinical end users on how to initiate their engagement with health ITs within hospital settings.

METHODS

We conducted qualitative interviews with 52 HCPs across Switzerland, representing 24 medical specialties from 14 hospitals. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed through inductive thematic analysis. Codes were developed iteratively, and themes and aggregated dimensions were refined through collaborative discussions.

RESULTS

Ten themes emerged from the interview data, namely (1) digital tool understanding, (2) peer-based learning strategies, (3) experimental learning approaches, (4) knowledge exchange and support, (5) training approaches, (6) proactive innovation, (7) an adaptive technology mindset, (8) critical thinking approaches, (9) dealing with emotions, and (10) empathy and human factors. Consequently, we devised 10 recommendations with specific advice to new clinical end users on how to approach new health care technologies, encompassing the following: take time to get to know and understand the tools you are working with; proactively ask experienced colleagues; simply try it out and practice; know where to get help and information; take sufficient training; embrace curiosity and pursue innovation; maintain an open and adaptable mindset; keep thinking critically and use your knowledge base; overcome your fears, and never lose the human and patient focus.

CONCLUSIONS

Our study emphasized the importance of comprehensive training and learning approaches for health care technologies based on the advice and recommendations of experienced HCPs based in Swiss hospitals. Moreover, these recommendations have implications for medical educators and clinical instructors, providing advice on effective methods to instruct and support new end users, enabling them to use novel technologies proficiently. Therefore, we advocate for new clinical end users, health care institutions and clinical instructors, academic institutions and medical educators, and regulatory bodies to prioritize effective training and cultivating technological readiness to optimize IT use in health care.

Usability of Standards for Scaffolding in a Health Sciences Programme: A feasibility Study

BACKGROUND

Standards contribute to comprehensive and programmatic implementation of educational strategies, such as scaffolding. Although the development of educational standards follows a rigorous consensus approach, they are socially constructed and could result in varied interpretations by users. Reports of varied implementation of standards in health professions education underscore the need to test the developed standards for scaffolding in health sciences programmes. Usability entails determining whether a product like standards works as intended under the expected conditions and contexts. This study aimed to describe the usability of standards for scaffolding in a health sciences programme through a pilot study.

METHODS

A multi-method design employing user and expert-based usability evaluation techniques sought to describe the usability of the standards for scaffolding in a three-year pre-registration nursing programme. The user sample of nurse educators drawn from the programme, conducted a self-assessment on scaffolding practices in the programme using a developed standards checklist. For the expert sample, three-panel members with an understanding of the discipline and programme context were purposively sampled. These panelists studied the users' self-assessment reports before completing an author-generated heuristics checklist to support or refute any of the standards. Descriptive statistics, comparative and content analysis were applied to analyse data from users' interviews and expert's completed heuristics checklist, determining the standards' usability, and identifying the usability flaws or strengths.

RESULTS

The users had three or more years of teaching experience in the competency-based curriculum for nursing. The experts shared an average of 16 years of experience in teaching in higher education, and seven years of experience in quality assurance and programme accreditation. The four standards had a usability score of above average (68%). Seven usability strengths and four usability flaws were identified. Usability flaws related to misinterpretation of some criteria statements and terminologies, multiple meanings, and users' challenges in generating evidence for some criteria.

CONCLUSIONS

The pilot study revealed the context-based 'truth' regarding the fidelity of a health sciences programme evaluation on scaffolding, as well as identifying the ideal contextual conditions in which the standards for scaffolding health sciences programmes would work best. The identified usability flaws highlighted the need for further revisions of the standards. Future research on the feasibility of the standards in other health sciences programmes and contexts is recommended.

Key Performance Indicators: A Framework for Allied Healthcare Educational Institutions

Background

Performance evaluation in the allied healthcare education sector is complex, making it essential for policymakers and managers to approach it comprehensively and thoughtfully to understand their performance. Hence, the development and monitoring of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in this domain must be considered one of the key priorities for the policymakers in AHIs.

Aim

This study aims to develop a framework for the AHIs to extract and profile the indicators, measure, and report the results appropriately.

Methods

The authors adopted a general review of the literature approach to study the primary goals of the institutional KPI framework, emphasizing the need for benchmarking while implementing KPIs and how to track performance using a KPI dashboard.

Results

The study provides the scope, relevant KPI categories, and a list of KPIs for evaluating the effectiveness of allied healthcare programs. The study findings also emphasized the need for benchmarking the KPIs and establishing a KPI dashboard while measuring and monitoring performance.

Conclusion

KPIs are considered an invaluable tool that contributes immensely to the performance monitoring process of AHIs, irrespective of the specialties. This helps to identify and guide AHIs for developing KPIs and the associated minimum data set to measure organizational performance and monitor the quality of teaching and learning. In addition, the KPI framework reported in this study is a tool to assist performance monitoring that can subsequently contribute to the overall quality of AHIs.