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Section 4: Evaluation and Change Management
To ensure that students gain the competencies needed to provide team- based patient-centered care and improve patient outcomes, institutions should regularly evaluate the effectiveness of their IPE programs.28 While interprofessional education and learning is widely regarded as a valuable addition to health professions education, educators are challenged to provide reliable evidence to support its value.
In 2015, the then-Institute of Medicine and the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education both released reports responding to the lack of well-designed studies that chart the correlation between IPE interventions and improved patient and health system outcomes.27, 28 While there are many evaluation tools in circulation, the wide variation in environments where IPE occurs complicates the formulation of broadly applicable ways to measure the effectiveness of IPE. Every setting has unique measurement needs, and, even within each setting, these needs may change at different times with different groups for different purposes.
When creating an evaluation tool, whether you customize an existing tool for your purposes or choose from an array of available options, consider these suggestions:
Ë Define the purpose of your evaluation and identify what indicators of success would look like. The tool should encapsulate all of the important questions and ideas at play.
Ë Assessments that only have outcomes related to attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, or feelings of students or the program participants are not informative about changes in behaviors, systems, or system outcomes. IPE’s overall purpose is to improve team- based, patient-centered health care; always consider this when measuring impact.
Ë A study about an interprofessional activity can be compromised if the respondent group is not also interprofessional. Different professions can have vastly different experiences of the same activity. It is important to capture feedback from all repre- sented professions.
Ë Multiple methods of evaluation are recommended to capture the complexities of an environment or an educational experience.25, 26
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ASCO IPECP Toolkit
June 2020