Interprofessional education in nursing: The impact of collaboration between physical and mental health care professionals

Objectives: Interprofessional collaboration in the training of nursing and psychology students helps provide students of both disciplines with the ability and competences they need to best attend to their patients. This study implemented and analyzed a method for developing the competences of each discipline in a scenario of joint clinical simulation that incorporates mental and physical health simultaneously, and measured the caring ability of the participating students. Methods: Participants took a self-applied survey measuring their own caring ability. After, a clinical simulation was performed where nursing students performed clinical interviews on psychology students, who acted as standardized patients. Caring abilities were measured in the nursing students, and the psychology students implemented an intervention service measuring caring ability and brief - debrief simulation by coaching to nursing students. Results: The results indicated that the self-applied questionnaire of caring ability resulted in scores significantly higher than what was measured by observers. Conclusions: The results contribute to the development of protocols, training and collaborative work practices in interprofessional education, which allow the scaling of these competences.