Interprofessional Ethics Education: A Virtual Approach

Abstract: Our team developed a grant-funded, novel healthcare ethics education intervention for medical students and student nurses. The goals were to strengthen mutual perspective-taking, clarify the unique roles and responsibilities of the interprofessional team, improve communication about complex ethical issues, and manage difficult conversations with patients/families focused on differing values and goals of care. In this presentation, we will describe the simulation developed for this project where students engaged synchronously online in an interprofessional planning meeting and then delivered news about a patient’s brain death diagnosis to a grieving family member (Standardized Patient [SP]). We will outline the pre-simulation education, simulation template, and semi-structured debrief rooted in best practice and discuss training provided to the SPs and faculty facilitators. We will review the findings of the pretest/posttest, which included student perceptions of interprofessional teamwork (SPICE-R) and an evaluation of student knowledge of brain death, organ donation practices, and related ethical issues. Our findings indicate that the simulation correlated with significant improvements in students’ positive valuations of teamwork and in their understanding of the roles and responsibilities necessary for interprofessional collaboration. We will share the results from the knowledge quiz, which also showed significant improvements, though there were limitations in this data. Finally, we will share the findings from the Moral Distress Thermometer (MDT), which we used to compare students’ baseline self-assessment of moral distress to their emotional responses before, during, and after the simulation. Although moral distress increased with the simulation, students’ self-reports of moral distress returned near baseline after debriefing.

Jennifer Bartlett, PhD, RN-BC, CNE, CHSE – Associate Professor of Nursing, Georgia Baptist College of Nursing of Mercer University, Atlanta, GA