Abstract
Homecare providers in the community work with various professionals. However, little is known about how interprofessional collaboration can be promoted.
The purpose of our study was to evaluate the effect of a community-based workshop to promote homecare provider interprofessional collaboration. Quasi-experimental design was used. Participants were homecare professionals (e.g., homecare nurses, care managers) recruited from each professional organization in a suburban city of Japan. The workshop lasted 2 hours, which included small-group discussions. Three groups were studied: two-workshop group, one-workshop group, and control group. Mail surveys were conducted twice; each study group answered an anonymous self-administrated questionnaire before, and 6 months after the first workshop. To assess interprofessional collaboration, a scale to measure face-to-face cooperation levels among homecare providers (Fukui, 2014) was used. Two-hundred seventeen participants were analyzed (two-workshop 59, one-workshop 86, and control group 72). Approximately 40 % were men. Mean age (45.9 ± 10.2 years) and profession type (physician 24, nurses 28, care-manager 72, others 94) differed between the groups. An analysis of covariance revealed after adjusting for age, number of training sessions, profession type, and pre-intervention score, “recognizing face and belief” and “getting a chance to meet” at month six improved in the two-workshop group (p =0.012 and 0.095, respectively) and one-workshop group (p = 0.033 and 0.020, respectively), compared with the control-group. The two-workshop and one-workshop group were not significantly different at 6 months. This workshop might be effective for developing face-to-face relationships. Attending a single workshop may be enough to promote interprofessional collaboration.