Assessment of a Bioengineering and Nursing Student Partnership for Medical Product Design

In 2018, the Department of Bioengineering and the School of Nursing at University of Pittsburgh implemented an interdisciplinary partnership that integrated senior nursing students into the bioengineering capstone Senior Design course as part of a National Institutes of Health education grant. This two-semester course requires senior Bioengineering students to synthesize and extend principles from prior coursework toward the design a medical product meeting an unmet clinical need. Senior Design teams interact with clinicians, patients, and caregivers as part of the overall design process to understand the unique challenges of medical product design, including the requirements for regulatory approval. The teams develop iterative designs, fabricate prototypes, and perform both verification and validation testing to evaluate whether product performance criteria are met. Integrating nursing and bioengineering students was anticipated to provide opportunities for interprofessional learning, earlier and more frequent clinical input to the design process, and exposure to a spectrum of unmet clinical needs. Conversely, nursing students were anticipated to gain an understanding of the medical product design process, including regulatory requirements, to potentially empower future innovativeness.

The impact of this interdisciplinary partnership on the anticipated outcomes was assessed over a five-year timeframe using research surveys and student interviews. The design self-efficacy survey was administered in a pre-post manner to assess changes in bioengineering and nursing students' confidence, motivation, success expectancy, and apprehension for performing design activity. Students' interprofessional collaborative development was also measured in a retrospective pre-post manner using the interprofessional collaborative competency attainment survey. Finally, a spectrum of student interviews was conducted to obtain perspectives about the interdisciplinary partnership. The data were analyzed using statistical and qualitative data methods.

The results were overwhelmingly positive for the partnership. The results make a strong case for such partnerships and suggest benefits for both student groups, including significant effects for design confidence and a multitude of collaborative competencies. For bioengineering students, the nursing students' clinical knowledge, perspectives, suggestions related to unmet clinical needs, and feedback were mentioned by 84% of interviewees as a partnership benefit. The nursing students cited interprofessional teamwork as the most valuable benefit (71% of interviewees) and indicated that it supported their ability to be innovative.

The results make a strong case for engineering and nursing schools to pursue and establish partnerships between their students. This study is situated in the literature as part of an evolving trend of partnership between these two professions.