Health Sciences Faculty Attitude and Readiness Towards Simulation-Based Inter-Professional Education.

OBJECTIVE: To explore attitude and readiness of health sciences faculty towards simulation-based inter-professional education (IPE).

STUDY DESIGN: Qualitative case-study; critical realist paradigm as used. Place and Duration of the Study: Bahria University Health Sciences Campus from December 2022 to March 2023.

METHODOLOGY: Maximum variation purposive sampling technique was used for selecting the participants. A total of thirty-one participants were selected. Five faculty members from Nursing, five from Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT), five Medical Laboratory Technologists (MLT), eight participants from medical, and eight from the dental faculty. Data were collected using individual semi-structured interviews and two focus group discussion. Duration of an individual interview was 30 minutes and that of the focus group discussion was 60 minutes. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. Community of inquiry and community of practice theoretical framework were used for guiding the research design and interviews. Pattern matching technique was used for the data analysis. Atlas ti-9 was used for organising the data.

RESULTS: Ten themes were identified after the analysis. teamwork, understanding roles and responsibilities, time constraint communication skills, curriculum integration, patient outcome, interprofessional boundaries, ethics in practice, faculty training, and visionary leadership.

CONCLUSION: The faculty members valued interprofessional education but were reluctant to implement it due to the limited resources. There is a need of faculty development for implementation of simulation-based interprofessional education. There is insufficient research on simulation and interprofessional education in Pakistan because of which faculty members are unacquainted of its benefits.

KEY WORDS: Interprofessional education, Simulation-based learning, Medical education.