A Qualitative Analysis of Community Participants’ Experiences with a Virtual Interprofessional Team Visit (vIPTV) with Healthcare Students

Abstract

Healthcare students must develop essential interprofessional skills to provide efficient, safe, and effective patient-centered care. To ensure students receive the proper training to develop these skills, an interprofessional team visit (IPTV) program was established at a large urban university in 2011. The program involved teams of students from nine disciplines conducting home visits with community participants to provide patient-centered care and educational resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the IPTV program transitioned to a virtual delivery first piloted in 2020. The aims of this study were to evaluate the community participants’ experiences with virtual IPTV (vIPTV), identify benefits and challenges related to transitioning from in-person to virtual delivery, and utilize participants’ feedback to improve the IPTV program. Focus groups with 39 total participants were conducted in seven different sessions during December 2021 and January 2022. Qualitative analysis of the data showed that participants value the IPTV program, had positive experiences with the virtual delivery, and desire personalized interactions. Community participant's feedback can enhance virtual educational experiences for healthcare students’ training.