Date Presented 04/04/19
The innovative use of a feeding, swallowing, and nutrition interprofessional education event gave students the opportunity to learn about and practice various aspects of how OTs, speech therapists, and nutritionists work together. Students from these three different fields of study expanded their knowledge of each profession’s scope of practice and learned how interprofessional collaboration can result in the maximum benefit for a client in the healthcare setting.
Primary Author and Speaker: Veronica Rowe
Additional Authors and Speakers: Emily Millard, Chelsea Clarkson
PURPOSE: Interprofessional practice (IPP) and interprofessional education (IPE) is the future of quality health care practice and education. The World Health Organization (WHO) states an “IPE occurs when two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes” (WHO, 2010). To improve IPE at the undergraduate and graduate levels, many universities and departments are supporting IPE forums and workshops. Three departments at a university collaborated to promote the IPP that naturally occurs in feeding, swallowing, and nutrition. Each of these professions work together in a variety of settings to ensure that clients are able to feed themselves, swallow appropriately, and ingest adequate nutrition.
DESIGN: A pretest-postest design was used for this study. This simulation included students from three departments: Occupational Therapy (OT), Nutrition, and Speech Language Pathology (SLP). The Student Perceptions of Interprofessional Clinical Education–Revised (SPICE-R) questionnaire (Fike, et al, 2013) was used before and after the feeding, swallowing, and nutrition IPE. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the university.
METHOD: All students were required to attend the lecture and lab portions of this IPE. The lecture was delivered by faculty from each of the three departments. The emphasis was on the importance of interprofessional collaboration of feeding, swallowing, and nutrition in the healthcare setting. Topics covered included dysphagia, assistive devices used for feeding, as well as specific modified diets. Each faculty introduced their respective scope of practice in the role in management of feeding, swallowing, and nutrition. In the lab section of the IPE, students experienced hands-on learning with assistive feeding equipment, thickeners for liquids, barium, various food textures, and a line spread demonstration. Specifically, students experienced preparing and tasting thickened liquids and modified diets, using various pieces of adaptive feeding equipment, and considering multiple components of nutrition. Voluntary completion of the SPICE-R questionnaire consisted of 10 items and 3 factors dedicated to interprofessional teamwork and team-based practice (items 1, 5, 6, & 8-10), roles/responsibilities for collaborative practice (items 2 & 7), and patient outcomes from collaborative practice (items 3 & 4).
RESULTS: One hundred twenty-eight students completed the SPICE-R before and after the IPE event (n=56 from OT; n=51 from SLP; n=21 from nutrition). There was a significant increase of all three departments’ student’s scores on the SPICE-R from pretest to posttest on 8 out of 10 questions surveyed (p<.05). These results suggest that this IPE on feeding, swallowing, and nutrition does have an effect on students’ perceptions of IPP Specifically, results suggest that the students’ perceptions and opinion of IPP benefitted from this event.
CONCLUSION: The innovative use of a feeding, swallowing, and nutrition IPE gave students the opportunity to learn about and practice various aspects of how Occupational Therapists, Speech Language Pathologists, and Nutritionists work together. The simulation aspects of this IPE assist students in empathizing with future clients by experiencing food in altered ways. Students from three different fields of study expanded their knowledge of each profession’s scope of practice and learned how interprofessional collaboration can result in the maximum benefit for a client in the healthcare setting.
References
World Health Organization (WHO). (2010). Framework for action on interprofessional education & collaborative practice. Geneva: World Health Organization.
Fike, D.S., Zorek, J.A., MacLaughlin, A.A., Samiuddin, M., Young, R.B., and MacLaughlin, E.J. (2013). Development and validation of the student perceptions of physician-pharmacist interprofessional clinical education (SPICE) instrument. Am J Pharm Educ. 77(9): Article 190. doi:10.5688/ajpe779190
