Development and evaluation of a regional, large-scale interprofessional collaborative care summit.

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Interprofessional Collaboration
• Medical Simulation

Background:

• The Northeastern/Central Pennsylvania Interprofessional Education Coalition (NECPA IPEC) promotes interprofessional education.
• Smaller academic institutions collaborated to enhance healthcare training.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of an interprofessional learning summit.
• To assess learners' perceptions and attitudes toward interprofessional education.

Main Methods:

• A 3-hour summit focused on ischemic stroke management for 676 learners from 10 institutions and 16 professions.
• Learner perceptions were measured using the Interprofessional Education Perception Scale (IEPS) pre- and post-summit, Likert-type, and open-ended questions.
• Data analysis included descriptive statistics, statistical tests, and qualitative thematic coding.

Main Results:

• Learner attitudes toward interprofessional education were already high and did not significantly change post-summit.
• A high percentage of learners and facilitators agreed the summit was effective and met its objectives.
• Thematic analysis confirmed students gained a sense of interprofessional core competencies.

Conclusions:

• Collaborative interprofessional learning initiatives, though resource-intensive, are beneficial for learners.
• The summit successfully reinforced interprofessional competencies and collaboration skills.
• This model demonstrates a viable approach to large-scale interprofessional education.