Using case studies to evaluate students' ability to develop a geriatric interdisciplinary care plan

The Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training (GITT) program, an educational intervention funded by The John A. Hartford Foundation of New York City, has trained more than 1800 health care professions students and clinicians throughout the United States. Evaluating the effectiveness of this training intervention has proven to be quite a challenge. Core measures were collected pre- and post-GITT training to evaluate student development as a result of GITT. This paper focuses on one of these core measures, the Test of Geriatric Interdisciplinary Care Planning (TGICP). This instrument, developed for the GITT program, is one mechanism created to test trainees' ability to develop an interdisciplinary plan of care. Using a case study methodology, this two-part instrument provides an innovative approach to quantifying and correlating responses from an interdisciplinary cohort of students. This paper will describe the development of the TGICP, including the creation and validation of the case studies, the framework for the questionnaire, and the coding and scoring mechanism created to evaluate trainee responses.