50 Chapter 3 different specialists, nursing actions and aftercare. The categories medication, nursing actions and aftercare had the highest ratio of significantly different items. When zooming into each category, some remarkable differences were found. First, some standard nursing actions like EWS, NRS and SNAQ are more often identified in an IPE plan than in an UPE plan. Medical students in the UPE-group might not have knowledge of these items. Nursing students should be aware of these standard actions, since they perform them every day. But when writing down the assignment alone, they seemed to forget to make it explicit, while with the IPE couples, these actions were discussed with students that weren’t familiar with them (medical students) and are therefore made explicit. This exchange of discipline specific knowledge is reported in the literature as one of the main outcomes of IPE (Guraya & Barr, 2018; Marion-Martins & Pinho, 2020; Teuwen et al., 2022). Second, delirium interventions and DOS-scores were also significantly more often mentioned in an IPE plan than in an UPE plan. This is an important finding for the prevention and early recognition of delirium, which is major problem in hospitalized older patients (Vasilevskis et al., 2012). The DOS is a delirium screening tool which is validated for hospitalized older adults (Gavinski et al., 2016). Education around delirium and screening has already shown to improve knowledge and correct evaluation of delirium (Gesin et al., 2012). This study shows how interprofessional collaboration can also improve the awareness around delirium screening. The proportion of items that were significantly more often identified in IPE plans than in UPE plans is also high in the ‘medication’ category: in 4 out of 10 items the IPE group identified the item significantly more often than the UPE group. Apparently when medical students and nursing students discuss a case together, they think about medication more often, or they more often write down the right medication actions. This is consistent with the literature about how IPE programs can improve medication knowledge in health professionals and reduce medication errors in hospitalized patients (Auvinen et al., 2021; Irajpour et al., 2019; Mecca et al., 2019). This is an important finding since polypharmacy is major topic in elderly patients (Hajjar et al., 2007). The last category which showed the highest ratio of significantly different items was the ‘aftercare’ category. Although this category contained very few items (5 in total of the four care plans), IPE couples seem to think more often about arrangements and the care which is necessary to discharge a patient from the hospital than UPE students. When these arrangements and care are adequately tackled, it can have a direct influence on improving patient wellbeing and reducing health care costs (Janagama et al., 2020). IPE or better interprofessional collaboration in clinical practice may have, for that reason, a positive influence on reducing health care expenses.
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