Translating a Needs Assessment into Outcomes for an IPE Center
Poster Description: While our university has had an interprofessional education program for ten years, we have more recently decided to re-evaluate and revitalize our program. We have several programs and opportunities under the auspices of IPE but need to consider priorities and possibly new programming. To that end, we distributed a needs assessment to our College faculty to help us formulate strategic goals, initiatives, and programming to support interprofessional education (IPE). This needs assessment will help guide us to our next steps in evaluating and implementing IPE programming and give us a better understanding of community needs.
We distributed a survey to all employees in the College that included questions about their preferences and experiences regarding IPE programming, activities, and training. We then asked about future planning, what they would like to see on our website, and what type of teaching and research support they need.
Our university human subjects research board approved our needs assessment questionnaire. Twenty-four respondents consented to allow their responses to be presented outside of the university. Respondents included: 18 tenured/tenure-track faculty members (75%), four full-time lecturers (16.7%), one staff member (4.2%), and one occasional course instructor (4.2%). These respondents represented ten disciplines/professions in our College and in academic advising.
The majority of respondents had participated in IPE projects (67%). Among their views of IPE training projects, most of them endorsed wanting help strategizing how to implement IPE, including IPE simulations and help from more individuals with more experience. Among dissemination wishes, respondents endorsed wanting more consistent support on the Center website and through social media in promoting their IPE initiatives. Respondents strongly endorsed wanting to provide students with a micro credential requiring more significant integration of the curriculums across departments.
This poster will share the findings of the needs assessment. We will outline how we plan to share the findings with our Steering Committee and prioritize goals and initiatives in our IPE center. Possible next steps include having focus groups of faculty, staff, and students to better understand their needs, using our steering committee to re-imagine our programming, and creating a micro credential.
The needs assessment and program development process may be helpful to others with similar aims in developing strategic planning goals and IPE programming collaboratively.
