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Expanded school mental health (ESMH) utilizes interprofessional collaboration to implement learning support and mental health promotion strategies in schools. This study reports on the early development and initial psychometric examination of a new scale, the Index of Interprofessional Team Collaboration for Expanded School Mental Health (IITC-ESMH), for measuring the functioning of interprofessional teams.

Existing validated measures of pharmacist-physician collaboration focus on measuring attitudes toward collaboration and do not measure frequency of interactions that comprise actual collaborative behavior. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop and validate an instrument to measure the frequency of collaboration between general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists from the GP's perspective.

Effective communication and teamwork have been identified in the literature as key enablers of patient safety. The SBAR (Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation) process has proven to be an effective communication tool in acute care settings to structure high-urgency communications, particularly between physicians and nurses; however, little is known of its effectiveness in other settings. This study evaluated the effectiveness of an adapted SBAR tool for both urgent and non-urgent situations within a rehabilitation setting.

CONTEXT:

The need for interprofessional education is now firmly embedded in undergraduate healthcare curricula frameworks in Northern Ireland and has a role to play in preparation for professional practice. A questionnaire determining students' "readiness" for interprofessional education has been widely used and reported in the literature but there are other factors that contribute to students' abilities to learn in an interprofessional context.

INTRODUCTION:

Collaboration, within and between healthcare teams, facilitates effective healthcare. Internationally, the development of interprofessional education, as a means to facilitate more effective teamwork in health care, has been recognized for over forty years.

OBJECTIVE:

The aim of this paper is to evaluate students' attitudes toward the influence of interprofessional education on improvement of collaboration and teamwork.

METHODS:

OBJECTIVES: To assess the validity and reliability of an instrument to measure pharmacy students' attitudes toward physician-pharmacist collaboration, and compare those attitudes to the attitudes of medical students.

METHODS: One hundred sixty-six first-year pharmacy students and 77 first-year medical students at Midwestern University completed the Scale of Attitudes Toward Physician-Pharmacist Collaboration.

Readiness for interprofessional education (IPE) can be an important factor to evaluate because of the influences of attitudes toward the outcomes of interprofessional learning activities. However, a dearth of Japanese evaluation tools hinders its evaluation. The readiness for interprofessional learning scale (RIPLS) was selected, because it has been validated in different countries and its items reflected our local situation best. This research aimed to develop and validate a Japanese version of the original 19-item RIPLS.

Research shows slow improvement of the care of dying persons and their significant others. One of the reasons for that is the lack of palliative care education as an integral part of health professionals' undergraduate education. The paper discusses an attempt to develop innovative forms of palliative care education: an international, interprofessional and IT-supported undergraduate course for Swedish and Slovenian students of nursing, medicine, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, psychology and social work, which has been developed jointly by the two authors.

BACKGROUND: Many measurement scales for interprofessional collaboration are developed for one health professional group, typically nurses. Evaluating interprofessional collaborative relationships can benefit from employing a measurement scale suitable for multiple health provider groups, including physicians and other health professionals. To this end, the paper begins development of a new interprofessional collaboration measurement scale designed for use with nurses, physicians, and other professionals practicing in contemporary acute care settings.