Piloting an Interprofessional Education Program to Promote Interprofessional Identity Formation

The Interprofessional Identity Program (IPIP) was created to provide a longitudinal setting for nursing and medical students to learn about each other and consider their professional identities as members of interprofessional health care teams. The curriculum was predominantly student led and presented virtually, and considered the aspects of teamwork, resilience, critical consciousness, and workplace culture.
IPIP included four sessions held via Zoom between January and April 2021. Materials for each session were provided online and included focused pre-work for the students and discussion questions or tasks to be completed during the session. Groups of four to five students spent the first hour of the 90 minute sessions working together without faculty participation. Faculty facilitators from different health professions joined each group for the last 30 minutes to debrief and add their perspectives. After each session, students completed a survey to assess the effectiveness of the content and its perceived relevance to their future practice using quantitative and open-ended questions. Surveys included questions utilizing a 1 to 5 Likert scale, with a score of one being not effective at all and five being very effective, and open-ended questions for more subjective feedback. Upon completion of the program, students submitted a retrospective evaluation to determine their own growth of interprofessional knowledge based on the IPEC competencies.
Post-session surveys for all sessions showed that the majority of students found the sessions to be effective or very effective. The retrospective IPEC competency assessment showed self-determined improvements by the students, with average scores increasing from three out of five to four and a half out of five. Qualitative results are pending. These results suggest that a student-led, virtual IPE elective is a feasible and effective method to deliver IPE to healthcare students. This project is funded by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center IPEC Synergy Grant.