An evaluation of simulated documentation in interprofessional education with students within different nursing fields, primary education, medicine and social work.

Interprofessional simulation events have been shown to promote team working and collaboration. In academic settings, they provide an opportunity for students to build professional and theoretical knowledge and to gain insight into their own and other professions roles and sphere of competence (Granheim et al., 2018). An interprofessional learning session was organised involving students and academics from two universities in England from across learning disability nursing, children’s nursing, primary education, social work and medicine. The scenario provided to students aimed to increase the level of fidelity of the experience by using documentation templates that they use in their clinical practice areas. This provided familiarity and informed discussions where they shared information with peers and discussed areas of concern, protective factors and actions that would support the family in the future. 124 students completed the pre-survey and 64 students completed the post-survey. Students reported that their confidence in interprofessional working increased, on average from 3.6 to 7.5 on a scale of 1-10. Themes from the qualitative feedback included information sharing, the importance of working with others, clear communication across professionals and finally insight into the roles and perspectives of other professionals. The findings support and add to the plethora of research already available that shows the benefit of interprofessional education in academic settings. Furthermore, the benefit of including professions from outside of health and social care departments and the increasing fidelity of table-top simulated exercises through use of realistic documentation will be discussed in the poster.

References
Granheim, B. M., Shaw, J. M., and Mansah, M. (2018). The use of interprofessional learning and simulation in undergraduate nursing programs to address interprofessional communication and collaboration: An integrative review of the literature. Nurse Education Today, 62, 118-127.