Improving interprofessional communication: Conceptualizing, operationalizing and testing a healthcare improvisation communication workshop.

BACKGROUND

Communication errors are a leading cause of adverse events in the acute and ambulatory healthcare setting. We now understand that communication within and across professions and patients is a complex achievement with numerous barriers, including cultural, educational, and structural hurdles. Improvisation has been identified as an approach with great potential to develop communication skills for multi-disciplinary healthcare students.

OBJECTIVE

We report on the interdisciplinary conceptualization, operationalization, and effectiveness testing of a novel educational healthcare improvisation communication workshop.

DESIGN

Prospective pre-post test experimental.

SETTING

University of California, Irvine.

PARTICIPANTS

Total of 158 nursing, medicine, and population health students.

METHODS

We conceptualized improvisation through the constructs of presence, trust, and acceptance to develop workshop activities, then used the Kirkpatrick Learning Framework to test the workshop's feasibility, learning outcomes, and preliminary behavior changes.

RESULTS

Participants rated the feasibility of the workshop highly. Pre-post workshop effectiveness testing showed significant increases in communication and collaboration competencies. Qualitative data suggested workshop activities were powerful learning modality because they were premised by introducing their conceptual underpinning and providing tangible examples via the video and debrief. Qualitative data also suggested preliminary behavior changes post workshop.

CONCLUSIONS

We have developed and tested a communication teaching modality with strong conceptual grounding and empirical evidence of its efficacy in engaging healthcare students in collaborative communication, with documented evidence of learning that health educators can use in their courses. Future research is needed (and currently underway) to generate the evidence that the workshop can be adopted and sustained within a multi-school curriculum, which includes testing the feasibility of cross-school curriculum logistics (i.e. cross-listing the course to meet different school registrar policies, teaching workload sharing across faculty, etc.), as well as continued effectiveness testing.