Background Information Patient-centered care is important in helping individuals who live with multiple health conditions, requiring collaboration among healthcare professionals of different disciplines. Interprofessional collaborative practice has been defined by the World Health Organization as "multiple health workers from different professional backgrounds working together with patients, families, caregivers, and communities to deliver the highest quality of care". It is difficult for any one healthcare professional to address the number and variety of healthcare problems, making collaboration an important part of healthcare. An ability to effectively collaborate among health care disciplines in the areas of communication, role identification, team working skills, and conflict resolution are critical components of practice for health care professionals. This has led to educational institutions placing a greater emphasis on the development and integration of interprofessional education (IPE) into health professions curricula. The emphasis of IPE is to prepare health professions students to work together with the aim of building a safe, patient-centered health care environment5.
Experiential learning provides learners an opportunity to practice skills and techniques learned in the classroom in a real-world or practical setting. The benefits of experiential learning have long been held in high regard and include enhancing understanding of content and improvement in interpersonal skills. Implementation of experiential learning varies significantly across PT curricula. Some experiential learning methods are time and labor intensive, while others are less so. Cost, feasibility, time constraints, and course outcomes play a role in determining which methods work best for a particular course or program. Simulation has been used for decades to assist with skill acquisition and assessment. High-fidelity human patient simulation (HFPS) with a focus on clinical situations/scenarios is highly conducive to IPE. The term "simulation" refers to an experiential educational technique which "creates a situation or environment to allow persons to experience a representation of a real event for the purpose of practice, learning, evaluation, testing, or to gain understanding of systems or human actions.". In health care simulation, high-fidelity refers to "simulation experiences that are extremely realistic and provide a high level of interactivity and realism for the learner".
The use of simulation as a teaching pedagogy can be especially valuable in replicating the acute care setting.
Statement of the Problem The Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) set forth a series of core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice. The IPEC describes these core competencies as: " to the safe, high-quality, accessible, patient-centered care and enhanced population health outcomes desired by all". These core competencies were developed in order to prepare students to engage in lifelong learning and collaboration to improve community health outcomes. These competencies include: Values and Ethics (work with team members to maintain a climate of shared values, ethical conduct, and mutual respect), Roles and Responsibilities (Use the knowledge of one's own role and team members' expertise to address health outcomes), Communication (Communicate in a responsive, responsible, respectful, and compassionate manner with team members.), Teams and Teamwork (Apply values and principles of team science to adapt one\'s own role in a variety of team settings).
The use of HFPS has been utilized in education settings involving physical therapy students. A recent review that examined the effect of HFPS learning in Acute Cardiorespiratory Physical Therapy noted that there is currently a lack of quality studies that have examined this area of study. Part of the quality involved the choice of research design and the lack of validated outcome measures to assess variables of interest. The review was unable to determine whether HFPS can improve physical therapists\' clinical performance and/or preparedness. In addition, many studies examine pre-post simulation when capturing outcome data, demonstrating a further need for longer longitudinal studies to further assess student performance. There is also reported variability in how HFPS is used, the optimal delivery, timing, volume, and content.
The proposed study will have two objectives:
1. Assess the use of HFPS and whether it has an effect of improving physical therapy and nursing student performance related to clinical reasoning skills during simulated clinical situations.
2. Assess the use of HFPS and whether it has an effect of improving physical therapy and nursing student self-reported changes in team work and communication based on the IPEC core competencies.
