Advancing Interprofessional Communication: Preliminary Outcomes of a Novel Collaboration Framework in a Student Head Injury Clinic

Resumen de los autores

When healthcare providers practice interprofessional practice, care improves, and medical errors are reduced. Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) principles and the Team Strategies and Tools to Enhance Patient Performance and Safety (TeamSTEPPS®) frameworks are utilized in healthcare education to develop interprofessional collaborative practice skills, but there is little understanding of how these skills change over time. We sought to evaluate the development of interprofessional collaborative practice skills by examining graduate occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech-language pathology students' first-hand reports of their experiences over time in an interprofessional head injury clinic. We employed an applied interpretive qualitative research approach longitudinally collecting students' first-hand experiences in a head injury clinic utilizing the critical incident technique (CIT). We analyzed the students' weekly critical incident reports about their first-hand experiences, using directed content analysis. The students completed 52 critical incident reports about patient encounters in the head injury clinic. We generated four overarching themes: safety concerns, interprofessional practice, patient progress with collaborative effort, and development of skilled interventions. Our analysis of changes indicated that student experiences shifted substantially over time, with initial safety concerns leveling out and collaborative care efforts increasing over time. There was a clear progression from individual discipline focus to collaborative care practice, with a rise in co-treatments and integrated group sessions. CIT-based assessment of student reports confirmed that experiential learning environments, structured around IPEC principles and the TeamSTEPPS® framework, effectively developed interprofessional communication and collaborative practice skills.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Noce, N., Pena, K. A., Paparella, S., Lynch, A., Keller, E., Dallman, A., & Rothpletz-Puglia, P. (2026). Advancing Interprofessional Communication: Preliminary Outcomes of a Novel Collaboration Framework in a Student Head Injury Clinic. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1516859