Assessment of readiness for interprofessional education among various healthcare professions in Europe and North America.

Abstract

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Objectives This is a survey-based research project to determine students from a given healthcare institution: 1. readiness for IPE 2. attitudes toward IPE 3. readiness to teach other providers. 4. readiness to learn from other providers. 5. specialty-specific attitudes toward IPE. 6. relationship between the degree of development of professional identity and attitude toward IPE. 7. optimal number of specialties to participate in an IPE training. 8. intercultural differences regarding IPE. 9. confounding factors that affect readiness for IPE. Method An international group of INHWE members from the United States, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Sweden, and Poland has developed a 29 item survey to assess readiness healthcare students for IPE. The survey is a modification of the original survey developed by the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine that was designed for assessing medical students. This project s survey has been modified to be applicable to the other healthcare specialties including nursing, nursing assistant programs, pharmacy, paramedicine, social work, laboratory medicine, respiratory therapy, and physical and occupational therapies. To cover a broad spectrum of international participants, the survey has been translated into eight languages including Albanian, Bulgarian, English, French, Polish, Romanian and Spanish.