Introduction: Inter-Professional Education (IPE) is an educational engagement between students from two or more professions possibly leading to better collaboration among them in the future workplace. Several organizations have advocated, developed, and updated guidelines for IPE.
Objective: This study was aimed at assessing the medical, dental, and pharmacy students’ readiness toward interprofessional education (IPE), and to identify the association between readiness and the demographic profile of students in a university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire-based exploratory study involving 215 medical, dental, and pharmacy students at Ajman University, UAE, using convenience sampling. The survey questionnaire (Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale, RIPLS) had a total of 19 statements. The first 9 items were related to “teamwork and collaboration”, items 10– 16 were related to “professional identity”, and the remaining three (items 17– 19) were related to “roles and responsibilities”. The individual statements’ median (IQR) scores were calculated and the total scores were compared with the demographic characteristics of the respondents with suitable non-parametric tests at alpha=0.05.
Results: Altogether, 215 undergraduate students (medical (n= 35)), pharmacy (n=105), and dental (n=75) responded to the survey. The median (IQR) score for the 19 individual statements was ‘ 5 (4– 5)’ for 12 of the statements. The total scores and domain-specific scores (teamwork and collaboration, professional identity, and roles and responsibilities) according to respondents’ demography showed significant differences only in the case of the educational stream with professional identity score (p=< 0.001), and the total RIPLS score (p=0.024). Further, post hoc pairwise comparison showed a significant difference between medicine-pharmacy (p< 0.001), and dentistry-medicine (p=0.009), for professional identity, and medicine-pharmacy (p=0.020) for the total RIPLS score.
Conclusion: A high readiness score among students offers the possibility of conducting IPE modules. A favorable attitude can be considered by curriculum planners while initiating IPE sessions.
Keywords: dental, interprofessional education, medical, pharmacy, teamwork, United Arab Emirates