Enhancing medical students’ understanding of the role of the health care team through a simulated patient journey scenario

Ineffective inter-professional collaboration and devaluing junior members of the health care team can create barriers to patient care and ultimately result in adverse patient outcomes. Education providers need to ensure that teaching strategies aimed at promotingeffective team work in health care provision are an integral part of the curriculum. We developed and evaluated a teaching session that used a simulated patient journey scenario based on a ‘patient’ with chest pain that introduced first year medical students to the roles and responsibilities of many of the health professionals involved in patient care. A survey questionnaire comprised of 5 ranked item questions and 4 short answer questions was distributed to participating students to determine if the session increased their awareness and understanding of thecontribution of the multidisciplinary health care team. The response rate was 96% (90/94). The 5 ranked items were analysedusing descriptive statistics, with results from all questions positive:means ranged from 4.15 to 4.71 (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither agree or disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree). Topic coding of the short answer questions provided supporting information to explain their responses. This specially designed simulated patient journey scenario for newmedical students enhanced their understanding and appreciationof the roles and responsibilities of members of the health care team.