Determining the effectiveness of an interprofessional educational intervention for teamwork competencies among...

Interprofessional education is recognized widely as an essential component to improving patient outcomes but little progress has been made toward understanding the impact of specific educational interventions on interprofessional competencies. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a case study exercise aimed at improving students' teamwork competencies. A pre and posttest design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of two approaches to an educational intervention. The treatment group combined nursing, physical therapy, and pharmacy students; the control group involved only nursing students. The Team Skills Scale (TSS) was used to measure interprofessional teamwork competencies and open-ended questions were used to elicit students' views. Mean pretest scores were similar for both the treatment and control groups. Following the intervention, posttest TSS scores were significantly higher for both the treatment group and control groups. However, posttest scores for the treatment group were significantly higher than the control group (mean score change 19.2 for treatment group versus 10.0 for control group), indicating that the face-to-face interaction between students of different professions had a greater impact. Themes that emerged from the open-ended questions support the quantitative findings, indicating that the intervention was useful for improving teamwork competencies.