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. 2023 Dec 18;23(1):968.
doi: 10.1186/s12909-023-04934-6.

Embedding patient safety in a scaffold of interprofessional education; a qualitative study with thematic analysis

Shaista Salman Guraya  1 , Muhammad Umair Akhtar  1 , Nabil Sulaiman  2 , Leena R David  3 , Feras Jassim Jirjees  4 , Manal Awad  5 , Sausan Al Kawas  5 , Mohamed Hassan Taha  2 , Mohamed Haider  4 , Jacqueline Maria Dias  3 , Shada Aysha Kodumayil  1 , Nihar Ranjan Dash  2 , Amal Al-Qallaf  1 , Ahmed Hasswan  2 , Vida Abdolhamid Salmanpour  2 , Salman Yousuf Guraya  6
Affiliations

Embedding patient safety in a scaffold of interprofessional education; a qualitative study with thematic analysis

Shaista Salman Guraya et al. BMC Med Educ. .

Abstract

Background: Regardless of a proliferation of interest in reducing unsafe practices in healthcare, threats to patient safety (PS) remain high. Moreover, little attention has been paid towards the role of interprofessional education (IPE) in enhancing PS. This qualitative study was conducted to unfold the insights of the senior medical, dental and health sciences students at the University of Sharjah (UoS) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) about PS in an online IPE-based workshop.

Methods: This inductive thematic analysis study was conducted on senior medical and health students at the Colleges of Medicine, Dental Medicine, Health Sciences, and Pharmacy of UoS. During an online workshop, students discussed plausible solutions for four real practice-based clinical scenarios with elements of unsafe healthcare practices. During the breakout rooms, the students exhibited high level of articulation and proactively participated in discussions. The data from the online workshop were transcribed and then coding, categorizing, and labelling of recurrent themes were carried out. Multiple individual deliberations, consolidation, incorporation of the identified preliminary themes, and merging and reorganizing sub-themes led to a final thematic framework.

Results: This work delved into the perspectives of 248 students regarding teamwork, communication, problem-solving, and other aspects concerning PS in interprofessional settings in an online workshop. The iterative process of data transcription, curating and qualitative analysis surfaced 32 codes. Later, the inductive themaric analysis yielded five themes with distinct yet interconnected nested subthemes in the context of PS in IPE settings. These themes of information sharing and grounding (problem-solving, social skills), maintaining communication (clinical reasoning, shared mental model), executing interprofessional activities (collaborative practice, collaboration scripts), professional cognitive abilities (cognitive maturity, metacognition), and negotiating professional identities (systematic change, socio-economic scaffolding) emerged as fundamental pillars for enhancing PS in healthcare.

Conclusion: Our study demonstrated the outcome of an innovative and team-based workshop which embedded PS within a scaffold of IPE environment. This research calls for incorporation of the emerging areas of clinical reasoning, problem solving, collaborative practice, and shared mental model into medical curricula for structured IPE in improving PS domains in medical education. These findings underscore the need for multifaceted dimensions of IPE imperatives for cultivating collaborative competence.

Keywords: Cognitive maturity; Collaborative practice; Interprofessional education; Patient safety; Socio-economic scaffolding.

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Conflict of interest statement

Prof. Salman Y. Guraya is a senior editorial board member and a guest editor of the special collection of BMC Medical Education titled “advancing healthcare systems with interprofessional education and collaboration”. SYG, SSG, SAK, and JMD are editorial board members at BMC Medical Education. Other authors don’t have any conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
A chronological order of the phases of the research with details of the online workshop on the medical and health colleges students at the University of Sharjah
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
A stepwise data analysis of the qualitative data as developed by Braun and Clark’s 6-step approach
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Themes, sub-themes, and their inter-connectedness in the form of an onion ring relationship, as generated during the thematic analysis
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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