Interprofessional collaboration and turf wars how prevalent are hidden attitudes?

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Interprofessional Healthcare
• Attitude Measurement

Background:

• Interprofessional collaboration is vital for optimal patient outcomes in healthcare.
• Overlapping scopes of practice, such as between chiropractors and physical therapists, can lead to interprofessional "turf wars."
• Implicit attitudes, or unconscious biases, may underlie negative interprofessional dynamics, even when explicit attitudes are positive.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantitatively assess explicit and implicit attitudes of physical therapy students toward the chiropractic profession.
• To investigate potential negative stereotypes influencing interprofessional relationships in healthcare.

Main Methods:

• A paper-and-pencil instrument was administered to 49 physical therapy students and faculty at a Canadian university.
• Explicit attitudes were measured using direct questioning.
• Implicit attitudes were assessed by comparing response times to word associations between "chiropractic" and positive versus negative descriptors.

Main Results:

• Physical therapy students demonstrated significantly longer response times when associating "chiropractic" with positive words compared to negative words, indicating implicit bias.
• No significant correlation was found between explicit and implicit attitudes toward chiropractic (r = 0.13, p =.38).

Conclusions:

• Despite minimal explicit bias, physical therapy students exhibited a significant negative implicit bias toward chiropractic.
• This implicit bias may present a barrier to effective interprofessional collaboration between physical therapists and chiropractors.