The Collaboration Among Pediatric Residents, Nursing and Midwifery Students for Newborn Health: A Quasi-experimental Study on Interprofessional High-Fidelity Patient Simulation

Background: Pediatricians, midwives and nurses are the health professionals who provide treatment and care to newborns in life-threatening clinical conditions. Their professional training also consists of the development of communicative and collaborative capacities. Interprofessional simulation is effective training for improving students’ collaborative attitudes, although many questions remain about its feasibility and acceptability. Study design and participants: with the aim of investigating if interprofessional high-fidelity patient simulation (IHFPS) increases interprofessional collaboration, we implemented a pre and posttest design study in a Northern Italian University. The sample was composed of 126 nursing students and 20 midwifery students attending the last year of Nursing and Midwifery programs respectively and 20 residents attending the last two years of the Pediatric Residency Program. Methods: participants, who were grouped into small interprofessional teams, participated in an experimental intervention based on an IHFPS. To measure interprofessional collaboration attitude, the Jefferson Scale of Attitudes toward Physician-Nurse Collaboration was administered to all participants in pre- and post-test of IHFPS. Results and conclusions: at the pre-test, nursing and midwifery students presented greater attitude of interprofessional collaboration than pediatric residents. At the post-test, only nursing students presented a statistically significant increase in their attitude of interprofessional collaboration, although midwifery students and pediatric residents also presented an improvement in interprofessional collaborative attitude. The results indicated that all three professional groups presented a more positive attitude toward collaboration following the interprofessional simulation event compared to the pre-training, suggesting that IHFPS is beneficial for increasing collaborative attitudes in different professional groups.