Assessment of Attitudes and Perceptions of Health Care Students in an Inter‐Professional Cadaveric Dissection Elective

Introduction Inter‐professional education (IPE) within healthcare programs has been associated with improved collaborative behavior, patient care and satisfaction, reduced clinical error, and diminished negative professional stereotypes. An inter‐professional gross anatomy dissection course was created at McMaster University to facilitate IPE. Aim Within the course, a study was conducted to assess the attitudes and perceptions of healthcare students towards inter‐professional (IP) learning, at the entire cohort and at the professional group level. Methods Data was collected from eight cohorts over eight years to determine the influence of this IPE course on the attitudes and perceptions of students towards IPE. Each year, 28–35 first year students in medicine, midwifery, nursing, physician's assistant, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy programs are randomly assigned into inter‐professional teams for 10 weeks; a recent addition to the teams is the speech‐language pathology program. A before/after study design measured changes in attitudes and perceptions amongst all students (n = 191) and within each professional group. At week 1 and week 10 of the course, students were administered two scales to assess attitudes towards IP learning: the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) and the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale (IEPS). Pre‐ and post‐course sub‐scale score mean differences were assessed using the Wilcoxon Signed‐Rank Test (a = 0.05, two tail hypothesis). Results When assessing the entire cohort together, students experienced significant improvements (p < 0.05) in the following sub‐scales: teamwork and collaboration, positive professional identity, perception of actual cooperation, roles and responsibilities, and competency and autonomy. Although sub‐group analysis revealed that each professional group generally improved their attitudes towards IPE, each professional group performed differently on each sub‐scale. Eg. The only sub‐group that experienced significant improvements (p < 0.05) for the “perceived need for cooperation” sub‐scale were the midwifery students (n =25). Both midwifery and medical students (n =59) were resistant to significant changes in attitudes towards IPE, across 5/7 sub‐scales. Discussion and Conclusion Overall, the course led to a general improvement in attitudes and perceptions of students towards IPE and towards anatomy as a setting for IPE. Findings suggest that academic institutions should support ongoing IPE activities for all students, especially those in midwifery and medical school programs, to better prepare students for IP collaboration in the future. Next steps involve determining if students perform better on the IEPS & RIPLS scales in IP groups that share similar positive professional identity levels. Also, course modifications will be implemented to improve the IPE experience based on sub‐scales with unfavorable effect sizes. Finally, scales that can assess communication skills within the IPE course will be administered. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .