Introductory Experiential IPE Student Teams: Concordance in Team Behavior Ratings by Students, Community Members, and Faculty

Introduction: Introductory experiential interprofessional education (IPE) is necessary for health profession students to authentically engage with patients and develop team skills. Patients can also be a source of feedback about team performance. The objective of this work was to determine the agreement of student, community member, and faculty evaluations of team behavior skills after students engaged in an experiential IPE opportunity.

Methods: The Longitudinal Interprofessional Family-based Experience (LIFE) was an 11-week experiential module. Interprofessional student teams (n = 56 students, 10 teams) interviewed a community member with a chronic disease about their lived-experiences managing their condition, and interacting with healthcare providers and systems, and community organizations. Students conducted two team interviews. Students, community members, and faculty completed six items of the Interprofessional Collaborator Assessment Rubric (ICAR) inventory after each interview to assess communication, collaboration, roles/responsibilities, client-centered approach, and team functioning. Items were rated as 0 = not observable, 1 = minimal, 2 = developing, 3 = competent, and 4 = mastery.

Results: Faculty had lower average ratings for most student teams (n = 7 teams) compared to students’ self-evaluation. Faculty had lower average ratings for three teams compared to community members’ evaluations. The Intra-Class Correlation for community member-student ratings was 1.0, community member-faculty was 0.4 and student-faculty was 0.3.

Discussion: Community member ratings of interprofessional team performance were consistent with students’, but faculty showed poor reliability with student and community member ratings. Training patients, faculty, and students to use ICAR will be necessary to increase reliability for its future use.

Practice Implications

1. Authentic engagement with patients early in health profession training will allow students to experience as close to real-life scenarios as possible to understand the relevance of collaborative healthcare
2. Community members may provide feedback to improve student collaborative team performance, which may provide a mechanism to scale such IPE activities to include a source of immediate formative feedback for students
3. Appropriate trainings for the use of behavior tools, like ICAR, may be necessary when collecting multi-source feedback