Professional Poster

Designing a COVID-19 Vaccine Clinic: A Virtual IPE Session for Medical, Nursing and Public Health Students

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Background
The COVID-19 pandemic was a disruption that forced adaptation and innovation in interprofessional education. Conducting IPE virtually required additional planning and thought on ways to facilitate student interaction. The pandemic also impacted students’ individual experiences with health and healthcare, which needed to be shared and leveraged through IPE.

As such, we developed a 2-hour IPE session which included students from medicine, nursing, and public health. Student groups were tasked with designing a COVID-19 vaccine clinic, focusing on the roles and responsibilities needed to staff the clinic, and the patient’s perspective moving through each step of the clinic. Each team was given a unique link to Allo, a remote visual workspace, to design their clinic, which allowed all team members to work simultaneously and collaboratively.

Aims
The aim of this study is to assess student impact and satisfaction from participating in a team-based, task-focused, virtual interprofessional education session on COVID-19 vaccinations.

Methods
At the end of the session, students were asked to complete a self-assessment of their teamwork skills and a program evaluation. The self-assessment was a retrospective pre/post survey which focused on the three objectives of the session: 1. Engage health professionals in shared patient and population- focused problem-solving; 2. Integrate knowledge and experience of health professions to inform decisions, while respecting patient and community values; 3. Engage self and others to constructively manage disagreements. The program evaluation asked for student satisfaction with the IPE session.

The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and simple paired t-test.

Results
113 students participated in the session and completed the survey. The three-question retrospective pre/post survey used a 5-point Likert scale with 1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4= very good, 5=excellent. The cumulative means for the three questions pre-session was 10.8 (SD 2.3); post-session was 13.9 (SD 1.7), which showed a statistically significant increase (p=0.00).

The average satisfaction on a 10-point Likert scale with 1= not at all satisfied; 10= extremely satisfied was 7.5 (SD 2.5), with 56% of students rating 8, 9 or 10 on the scale.

Conclusion
After participating in the COVID-19 vaccine clinic IPE session, students reported an increase in all three teamwork-focused objectives. Students also reported high satisfaction with the session.

Reflection/Lessons Learned
Utilizing a shared online workspace was beneficial in promoting student interaction and teamwork during a virtual IPE session. Students seemed to enjoy and find value in a team-based approach to a relevant, problem/task-related activity.