Student servant leadership development during IPE experiences: a qualitative analysis

Models of leadership which emphasize collaboration, common goals, and fluidity rather than position are essential to interprofessional practice. Shared leadership in team-based practice helps to improve patient safety and outcomes and to enhance professionals' wellbeing. Developing future health professionals who incorporate these concepts into their work with colleagues and patients is a crucial component of interprofessional education. Assessing students' acquisition of these concepts is paramount and can be important not only in assessing student learning but also in program evaluation and improvement. The framework of our two-year longitudinal interprofessional education curriculum incorporated the seven pillars of servant leadership as a new lens for interprofessional practice. At the end of the curriculum, students from three academic health science colleges completed reflections as a summative assessment. This paper reports the results of a qualitative analysis of these students' reflections using the seven pillars as coding categories to determine the curriculum's effectiveness. All seven pillars of servant leadership were represented in the student reflections demonstrating the acquisition of shared leadership competencies. Importantly, the three pillars most frequently occurring across all reflective statements were compassionate collaborator, skilled communicator, and puts people first. Foresight was the leadership pillar that appeared the least in student reflections. Evaluation of student written reflections as a summative assessment is useful in determining students' acquisition of leadership skills and can be used as part of a continuous improvement process as well as for identifying weaker areas in the curriculum.