The role of personal resilience and personality traits of healthcare students on their attitudes towards interprofessional collaboration

Background Interprofessional collaboration (IPC) improves communication between healthcare workers and healthcare delivery. Interprofessional education (IPE) is essential in preparing healthcare students for cooperating with other healthcare disciplines in a real work setting. Although higher education settings have a responsibility to provide collaborative healthcare practice to students, IPE has not yet been prompted worldwide as a formal division in health professional education and in Israel IPE among health professions students is scarce. Objective To examine the attitudes of health professions students towards IPC in correlation with their personal resilience and personality traits. Design A descriptive cross-sectional design was used. Setting and Participants Participants were fourth year nursing, occupational therapy (OT), and physical therapy students studying in an academic undergraduate program at a School of Health Professions in a central university in Israel. Methods Attitudes were assessed with a questionnaire consisting of the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Big Five Inventory of personality dimensions, and a question evaluating students' experience with the PBL (Problem-Based Learning) method. Results Questionnaires were completed by 184 health professions students. Nursing students' perception of actual cooperation with other professions and their perceived competency and autonomy in their profession were slightly lower than those of other students. Among nursing students, positive correlations were found between competency & autonomy and resilience (p < 0.01) and between competency & autonomy and agreeableness (p < 0.05). Positive correlations were also found between their perception of actual cooperation with other professions and: resilience (p < 0.01), agreeableness (p < 0.05), conscientiousness (p < 0.05), and openness (p < 0.05). Only OT students were familiar with and experienced in the PBL method. This experience with PBL was found correlated with more positive attitudes towards competency and autonomy in the profession and higher positive perception of actual cooperation with other professions. Conclusions IPE, including PBL, should be integrated in health professions students' training.