Student pharmacists’ experiences of teamwork in a quality improvement course

David Rhys Axon, Patrick Campbell, Terri Warholak

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Introduction: Student pharmacists need to work in teams in the educational and practice settings, but there is limited information on their teamwork experiences in the published literature. The study objective was to assess second-year (P2) student pharmacists’ teamwork experiences in an experiential quality improvement (QI) course. Methods: A retrospective pre-post survey was conducted with P2 students to assess teamwork experience attitudes. Students reported their agreement with 17 statements about teamwork, first after the project was planned and again after the project was complete. A Kuder-Richardson 20 score was calculated to assess internal consistency. Differences between pre- and post- groups for each teamwork item were assessed using McNemar's test. An alpha level of 0.05 was used, and a Bonferroni correction was applied for multiple comparisons. Results: Sixty P2 students (50%) responded to the survey. After the project was complete, the majority indicated agreement with good teamwork qualities and disagreement with poor teamwork qualities for most items. More than 60% of respondents indicated they would like to do collaborative work again while 20% of respondents indicated imbalances in member contributions caused conflict within the team. Conclusions: The majority of student pharmacists in this investigation had positive experiences working in teams, but new important findings from this study indicate that further work is needed to prevent imbalances in team-member contributions and to encourage students to work on future collaborative projects in some cases.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)139-144
Number of pages6
JournalCurrents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning
Volume11
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2019

Keywords

  • Pharmacy research
  • Quality improvement
  • Student pharmacist
  • Student research
  • Teamwork

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Pharmacy
  • Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics(all)

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