Perception of health of those with chronic conditions as perceived by first year students in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy compared to actual patient perception of health

With the aging population and the epidemic proportions of chronic health conditions, students in healthcare professions need instruction in chronic disease prevention and management, including team-based patient centered care. Interprofessional curricula and methods to evaluate student outcomes are essential. The purpose of this study was to compare health perceptions of actual patients to those of health professional students. All first year students in medicine, pharmacy, nursing, occupational therapy and physical therapy at a Northeastern urban health science university participate in a two-year interprofessional education curriculum where teams of students meet with community dwelling individuals with chronic health conditions. The program has two major goals: to improve interprofesssional collaboration and to promote patient centered care (seeing the patient as a member of the healthcare team). During the orientation for this program, students (525) were asked to complete the “Perceptions of Patients Health Scale” developed by Diamond et al. There are four subscales: control, self-awareness of health, certainty about health information obtained, and importance of health. Normative data on hundreds of patients for each of the subscales of the tool exist in a database. Students will complete the tool again at the conclusion of one year of curriculum.

The research questions were: 1) On average, do first year students in the two year interprofessional education program rate patients' perceptions of health similarly to actual patients' perceptions of health. 2) Do any specialty area(s) of first year students rate patients' perceptions more similarly to actual patients than others? And 3) After one year of the interprofessional program, are there any changes in students' rating of patients' health perceptions as compared to actual patient perceptions of health? A comparison of the scores on subscales of students by discipline and sex, a comparison of scores on subscales of students to normative patient subscale scores and a comparison of scores by discipline from baseline to end of year one will be presented. This study discusses one assessment tool to evaluate student outcome after participation in an interprofessional program aimed at improving the future healthcare of people with chronic conditions.