Attitudes and perceptions of first year students towards interprofessional education in the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences at the University of the Western Cape

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The setting for this study was the University of the Western Cape, Faculty ofCommunity and Health Sciences, first year undergraduate students. All students whoparticipated in the compulsory interprofessional programme were from the followingdisciplines: Occupational Therapy; Physiotherapy; Psychology; Social Work; NaturalMedicine; Dietetics; Human Ecology; Sports Sciences and Nursing.The objectives of this study were to measure the attitudes and perceptions of firstyear students who participated in an undergraduate interprofessional programme.The attitudes and perceptions were further measured in relation to the specificlecturers involved, the age of the students, their gender, race, background as welltheir specific discipline.This was primarily a quantitative study incorporating two qualitative questions inwhich 657 students were issued with a questionnaire designed to determine theirattitudes and perceptions towards interprofessional education. A sample size of 264students resulted in 95% confidence intervals with a maximum precision of 5%. Thequestionnaire was adapted, with permission, from Cameron; Rennie; DiProspero;Langlois & Wagner (2009). MS Excel was used to capture the data and STATISTICAversion 9 (StatSoft Inc. (2009) STATISTICA (data analysis software system),www.statsoft.com.) was used to analyze the data from the questionnaires.Descriptive statistics was used to describe the main features of the sample of thisstudy and summary statistics was further used to summarize the findings of thisstudy in order to communicate the bulk of the information as simple as possible.Two open-ended questions were included at the end of the questionnaire and thiswas used to triangulate the data.The Kruskal-Wallace test was used to measure the results, whereby a p-value of<0.05 indicated statistical significance. Of all the factors used to measure theattitudes and perceptions of students, the following three were significant: Gender;Race and Discipline. No other factors impact on the attitudes and perceptions ofstudents towards interprofessional education. Student attitudes and perceptions towards interprofessional education were found tobe very positive. The findings revealed that the most significant factor in the studywas the lack of understanding of various disciplines participating in the programmeand their understanding of the relevance of the teaching approach (interprofessional)as well as their specific role in the health care team. This clearly illustrated the needto recommend to the co-ordinating unit of the programme that this be defined moreclearly for the students and specifically the Sports Sciences students.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University