Attitudes of Students toward Inter Professional Healthcare Teams: A Comparison between 1st-Year and 3rd-Year Students at Mongolian National University of Medical Sciences

Objective The purpose of this study is to describe attitudes toward inter professional education in Mongolia National University of Medical Sciences. Methods Cross-sectional study, Heinemann et al. [1] developed the Attitudes Toward Health Care Teams Scale (ATHCTS, 21-item instrument), which has potential for evaluating clinically based team training programs as well as use a pre- and post-test tool for educational interventions with teams. A 14-item instrument in which items containing the word “physician” have been removed from the original instrument is a modified version adapted by Curran et al. [2] to measure attitudes towards health care teams. Results In total, 249 I grade and 243 III grade undergraduate students participated in the study, respectively. Response rates by academic units of the undergraduate students were NS 88.3% (n=223), MD 39.0% (n=193), PT 53.8% (n=29), LS 42.0%(n=47), respectively. As shown in Table 1, comparisons using the Mann-Whitney test indicated that in mean scores of seven items, item 1 (3.83±1.169 vs 4.38±0.854, P<0.0001), item 3 (3.97±1.167 vs 4.43±0.702, p<0.05), item 4 (3.99±1.163 vs 4.61±0.62, P<0.0001), item 13 (3.5±1.164 vs 4.11±0.946, P<0.001), 1 st year students showed significantly lower scores than 3 rd year undergraduate students. Conclusion The present results showed that students possessed more positive attitudes toward IPE than I years undergraduate students, suggesting that exposure to clinical practice may result in withdrawal of the attitudes toward healthcare teams.