Un-siloing allied health practice and interprofessional learning: A co-design and evaluation case study

Background

An interprofessional service involves multiple professionals/caregivers collaborating to deliver quality care and comprehensive health services to clients. Leveraging the combined skills and perspectives in collaborative care improves client outcomes, saves time, and facilitates managing and coordinating chronic conditions. However, learning to coordinate different care stakeholders to manage multiple healthcare issues requires a shift in power structures and embracing diversity to teach and apply such procedures.

Objective

Co-design and evaluate interprofessional learning within a student-led clinic that offers optometry, audiology, physiotherapy, speech pathology, exercise physiology, occupational therapy, and nursing services to a diverse population (more than 50% born overseas). We aimed to identify the challenges/opportunities to improve the sustainability of quality care via interprofessional learning.

Methods

Ethics approval (No 1858) and consent was received to apply a Knowledge Translation Framework: PROLIFERATE (Figure 1) to co-design and evaluate interprofessional learning. After an initial implementation phase, we tested PROLIFERATE constructs via Net Promoting Score principles on an anonymised survey, measuring the promoters, passive, and detractors’ users of interprofessional learning.

Findings

The interprofessional co-creation involved three co-design sessions, n≈ 32 people each. It resulted in clinical learning activities outside the participant’s discipline through observation and follow-up discussions. The evaluation considered 15 participants in the areas of hearing (20%), speech pathology (27%), physiotherapy (13%), vision (20%), and other (20%). Each PROLIFERATE construct (Figure 1) unveiled:

(1) Comprehension: Promoters (47%), Passive (40%), detractors (13%)
(2) Emotional responses: Promoters (53%), Passive (33%), Detractors (13%)
(3) Barriers: Detractors (80%), Promoters (13%), Passive (7%)
(4) Motivation: Promoters (40%), Passive (47%), Detractors (13%)
(5) Optimization: Targeted time/schedule/space/focus

Conclusion

The design and implementation received a PROLIFERATE score of ‘Good Impact’ and captured essential planning strategies for overcoming the motivation barriers around interprofessional learning in allied health practices. Further investigation should incorporate our findings and longitudinally test them using a bigger sample. This study brings evidence and methods for supporting the World Health Organization’s recommendation on developing a “collaborative practice-ready” health workforce that embraces differences around expertise and personal characteristics (culture, ethnicity, ages, etc.) to improve health care.