Verification of Collaborative Practice Competencies for PA Students in Clinical Settings
Background: Physician Assistant (PA) education must ensure new graduates acquire collaborative practice skills. In our program, extant student performance evaluations for supervised clinical experiences have had one item related to collaborative practice skills. Our faculty identified one item was not sufficient to verify student acquisition specific collaborative practice skills. This lightning talk will describe our program's approach to address this deficiency and the outcomes of the pilot curriculum innovation. The purpose of this curriculum improvement project was to better measure students' acquisition of collaborative practice skills.
Methods: Our PA program created three new collaborative practice skills for students to demonstrate and clinical preceptors to assess during clinical training. The primary outcome measure for feasibility was student demonstration of the three collaborative practice skills as assessed by preceptors on student performance evaluations. Three specific skills were developed by PA program faculty and preceptors. In the 12-month pilot phase, verification of these skills was incorporated into the student performance evaluation for inpatient internal medicine training sites. Verification was encouraged but not required as it was unknown if skills could be verified. Preceptors and students were provided with brief training explaining the skills and how they could be demonstrated/evaluated in clinical settings.
Results: All three skills were verified for a vast majority of PA students across training sites.
Discussion: The results indicate it is feasible for students to demonstrate and preceptors to evaluate the three collaborative practice skills in inpatient internal medicine settings. Next steps include revision of training materials and plans to make verification of these skills required for course completion. This curricular innovation may be adapted and adopted by other programs aiming to assess learners' acquisition of collaborative practice skills in authentic clinical learning environments.
