Background: In recent years, increasing emphasis has been placed on the importance of collaboration within\nmulti-disciplinary healthcare teams, so as to facilitate holistic patient care and thus allow improved treatment\noutcomes. There is hence an urgent need to educate healthcare undergraduates early in their professional careers\non the importance of and complexities involved in cooperating with counterparts from other allied healthcare\nprofessions. In conjunction with this, a milestone student-led conference for undergraduate students, the 9th\nStudent Medical-Nursing Education Conference (SMEC), was organised in 2013 to provide a unique opportunity for\nshared learning among the entire cohort of undergraduate medical and nursing students in Singapore\nmatriculating in that year.\nMethods: This study evaluated the effectiveness of the 9th SMEC 2013 as a shared conference experience in\nimproving the attitudes of undergraduate medical and nursing students in Singapore towards inter-professional\neducation (IPE). A 19-point Readiness for Inter-Professional Learning Scale (RIPLS) questionnaire comprising\nthree subscales was administered to participants both before and after the conference. 352 responses were\ncollected, giving a response rate of 75.1 %. Results were analysed using paired-samples t-tests with statistical\nsignificance set at p = 0.05.\nResults: Improvements in overall scores for both medical and nursing students were reported for all three\nRIPLS subscales. Examining the RIPLS items individually, significant improvement in scores for both medical\nand nursing students was obtained in all 19 items. Prior exposure to IPE activities was not a predictor of\nimprovement in IPE attitudes.\nConclusion: The authors propose that student-led jointly-organised conference experiences are effective in\nimproving healthcare students� attitudes towards IPE. This study provides valuable insights to facilitate the\ndevelopment of further IPE programs to allow for the rapid and effective promotion of cooperation and\ncollaboration between students across various healthcare disciplines.
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