Interprofessional Education for Freshman Nursing and Pharmacy Students: An Application of Ethics

Interprofessional Education for Freshman Nursing and Pharmacy Students: An Application of Ethics

Purpose: The purpose is to encourage students in the health care professions to work interprofessionally to better enable them to enter the workplace as a member of the collaborative practice team.

Background: In 2009, six national education associations of schools of the health professions formed a collaborative to promote and encourage constituent efforts that would advance substantive interprofessional learning experiences (IPE) to help prepare future health professionals for enhanced team-based care of patients and improved population health outcomes. By 2016, this initiative has grown significantly, even being mandated by some professions.

Description of Intervention/Program: IPE activities were developed through a committee consisting of faculty and students from nursing and pharmacy programs at the institution. An activity for freshman students (N=152) was developed, focusing on each profession’s code of ethics and application to ethical situations. Students completed a pre/post survey evaluating their readiness and perceptions of IPE, as well as evaluating the activities’ effectiveness in effective collaboration using qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Results: The data was evaluated by the IPE committee to determine future iterations of the activity.

Conclusion: Based on both quantitative and qualitative feedback from the students, the freshman IPE activity assisted both pharmacy and nursing students to become a more effective member of the health care team, bringing students from different health care programs together to problem-solve while applying a collaboratively devised code of ethics with an application-based activity to produce a robust experience.

Relevance to IPE or Practice: The study conveys two key points that would be helpful for others integrating IPE activities into their curriculum. First, the authors illustrated an IPE activity that can be implemented with lower level professional students. Second, the authors outlined a plan for continuous improvement of IPE activity, looking beyond implementation to assessment and optimization of these initiatives.

Seminar Outline/Timeframe of Presentation and Interactive Discussion:

1. Opening discussion on IPE and its integration into the university curriculum (10 minutes)
2. Freshman activity initial ideas, design, and feedback: the value of interprofessional ethics in healthcare (10 minutes)
3. Modifications to the freshman activity and student feedback ( 10 minutes)
4. Interprofessional groupwork (5-6 group members made up of participants from different disciplines) to develop a shared code of ethics (10 minutes)
5. Interprofessional groupwork (same group members) using the shared code of ethics to solve a practical, real-world problem (10 minutes)
6. Large group discussion on the overall activity, components of the shared code of ethics, and application of the code to the problem-solving activity, and considerations for the future for this activity (10 minutes)

Two to three measureable learning objectives relevant to conference goals:

1. To create a coordinated effort across the nursing and pharmacy health profession curricula to embed essential interprofessional experience and content.
2. To guide professional and institutional curricular development of learning approaches and assessment strategies to achieve productive outcomes for nursing and pharmacy students.
3. To demonstrate a newly developed ethics activity for freshman students in nursing and pharmacy programs to exhibit interprofessional problem-solving.