JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Improving interprofessional communication and collaboration is necessary to facilitate early identification and treatment of patients with sepsis. Preparing undergraduate medical and nursing students for the knowledge and skills required for assessing, escalating and managing patients with sepsis is crucial for entry into clinical practice. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures created the need for distance learning to support collaborative learning.

Objective:

To evaluate the effect of a sepsis interprofessional education (IPE) on medical and nursing students’ sepsis knowledge, team communication skills and skill utilisation in clinical practice.

Methods:

A mixed-methods design using a one-group pre-test–post-test design and focus group discussions was used. The study involved a total of 415 undergraduate medical and nursing students from a university in Singapore. After a baseline evaluation of the participants’ sepsis knowledge and team communication skills, the participants underwent didactic e-learning followed by virtual simulation on early recognition and management of sepsis and team communication strategies. The participants’ sepsis knowledge and team communication skills were evaluated immediately after and two months after the simulation. Four focus group discussions were conducted with a purposive sample of 18 medical and nursing students to explore their transfer of learning to clinical practice.

Results:

Compared with the baseline scores, both the medical and nursing students demonstrated a significant improvement in sepsis knowledge (P<.001) and team communication skills (P<.001) in immediate post-test scores. At two months’ follow-up, the nursing students continued to have statistically significant higher sepsis knowledge (P<.001) and communication scores (P<.001) compared with the pre-test scores, whereas the medical students had no significant changes in test scores between two months’ follow-up and pre-test (P=1.00). Three themes emerged from the qualitative findings: (1) greater understanding of each other’s role, (2) application of mental models in clinical practice and (3) theory–practice gaps. The sepsis IPE — in particular, the use of virtual simulation — fostered the participants’ understanding and appreciation of each other’s interprofessional role when caring for patients with sepsis. Despite noting some incongruities with the real world of clinical practice and not encountering many sepsis scenarios in clinical settings, participants shared the application of mental models using interprofessional communication strategies and the patient assessment framework in their daily clinical practice.

Conclusions:

Although the study did not show long-term knowledge retention, the use of virtual simulation played a critical role in facilitating the application of mental models for learning transfer, and therefore could serve as a promising education tool for sepsis training. For greater clinical effect, future studies could complement the virtual simulation with a mannequin-based simulation and provide more evidence on the long-term retention of sepsis knowledge and clinical skills performance.