Evaluating the Alignment of an Interprofessional Practicum with a National Health Promotion Framework and then Strengthening the Alignment Through Sharing Evidence-Based Practices

This poster presents an overview of a program evaluation and a subsequent project informed by the evaluation. The first portion of this project was undertaken by an interdisciplinary team in a graduate program evaluation course in collaboration with the Saint Louis University (SLU) IPE program. The IPE community practicum at SLU has been ongoing in partnership with community agencies for several years. Undergraduate health professions students in interprofessional work in community to collaboratively plan and execute projects aimed at the service population. The IPE practicum requires students to choose a Healthy People 2030 objective that aligns with the population health goals of their project. An aim of doing this is to help build capacity with partners by tying student work to a nationally funded framework. In our evaluation project, we sought to quantify the strength of alignment so that we could provide recommendations around refining the way students partner with agencies to pick projects that work towards community-relevant health indicators as identified by the Healthy People initiative.

We used a formative evaluation approach to assess the strength of student project alignment using secondary analysis of student assignments. We identified a representative subsample of projects (n=24), and iteratively refined our conceptualization and screening of alignment by creating scoring rubrics, collaborating with IPE staff, group meetings, and through using inter-rater reliability analysis methods to quantify our consistency in screening. Our results indicated areas of refinement for the practicum. Our recommendations center on robust introduction to the HP 2030 framework, balancing priorities of alignment with community partner and community needs and building on previous student work within the same agency or similar contexts.

The second portion of the project is being undertaken by a graduate assistant and student worker in the IPE program. We have been working on and will present our results creating a searchable database of evidence-based best practices that align with HP 2030 Goals. This database will help student work build on past work and use methods and interventions modeled from practices related to HP 2030 objectives. This effort also uncovered the need to develop resources for training the screening process used by the course team for future users.

This project represents a student-led collaboration in formal collaboration with university IPE program. The students in the project represented interdisciplinary teaming with disciplines in social science, social work, and cybersecurity all taking part in different components of the project.