Interprofessional Education: a Step towards Team Work Improvement in Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation

Cardiopulmonary arrest is one of the main medical urgencies. Studies show that 20% to 30% of patients could be resuscitated via an efficient cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Training CPR through interprofessional method could lead to improving the performance of resuscitation group. The aim of this research was to study the effects of Interprofessional training on resuscitation group's teamwork performance.

This was a quasi-experimental study of nonequivalent control group design performed in Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences in the year 2010. At first an Interprofessional study guide for CPR education was developed. Then 60 health care employees including physicians, nurses, anesthesia technicians, and operating room technicians were selected through stratified sampling and were divided into two control and intervention groups. The control group was trained via the routine method, and the intervention group was trained through interprofessional method using the study guide. A checklist was designed for assessing teamwork performance. Then, pre-test and post-test was administered for both groups. The gathered data was analyzed by SPSS software using Mann Withney U Test.

The findings revealed that intervention group’s score of teamwork performance increased significantly compared to the achieved score in pretest (p=0.00). After intervention also, teamwork performance score for intervention group was significantly higher than that of the control group (p=0.00).

Education along with other professions and using additional active learning methods could lead to the improvement in teamwork performance. This kind of education can improve the relationship between professions and train a compatible group of responsible professionals which can bring about a high quality health care service to the patients and lead to decreasing the side effects of diseases.