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

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Educational curriculum; Healthcare; Improvisation; Interprofessional communication and collaboration.