Breaking Silos: Evaluating an Interprofessional Education Workshop to Enhance Readiness for Collaboration among Health Professional Learners – A Quasi-experimental Study

Abstract

Interprofessional education (IPE) enforces the key idea of learning together that enhances future partnerships among learners. IPE fosters a collaborative approach to team-based healthcare that improves the patient outcomes. This study aims to evaluate the interprofessional readiness score among undergraduate students and compare the subscale scores across study groups. This quasi-experimental study was conducted among four different groups of medical and allied health students who were introduced to a day-long workshop on IP competencies, including role clarity, ethics communication, and teamwork, through multimodal teaching and learning methods. Postworkshop, their responses were assessed by a validated tool, namely “Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS)” questionnaire. The questionnaire comprises 19 components grouped into three subscales: “teamwork and collaboration,” (1–9) “professional identity,” (10–16) and “roles and responsibilities” (17–19). The descriptive data and median scores for the various groups of participants were analyzed using the Kruskal–Wallis test. The total participants were 204, inclusive of 156 females and 48 males, with an age range of 18–23 years. Among them, 74 were medical, 36 BSc Physician Assistants, 57 BSc nursing, and 37 BSc Critical Care. The readiness scores remained high pre- and postintervention (73.81 ± 8.2 and 74.12 ± 9.3), reflecting a strong willingness for participants. Only the roles and responsibilities domain showed significant improvement (<0.05), indicating better role clarity. This study revealed that health professional learners’ readiness for IPE had high perception mean scores in all RIPLS subscales. Postintervention, only “roles and responsibilities” subscale showed a significant change. Students were eager to experience IPE in the real-world settings.