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IOH Toolkit
Chapter 2. Are You Ready?
Once you’ve set your sights on a new project, it can be tempting to charge ahead, full throttle. But before you do that, take some time to assess your institution’s readiness.
- Are faculty members open to interprofessional education?
- Do they have collaborative skills?
- What do faculty know about oral health?
- How do they feel about oral health integration?
The answers to these questions will help you determine professional development needs at your institution and drive the awareness building and professional development campaigns that get your program off the ground.
To assess readiness for oral health integration at your institution, you’ll need to:
Examine Current Curriculum
Assess Faculty Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes About Oral Health
Assess Faculty Attitudes Towards Teamwork
Analyze and Interpret Data
Develop a Plan Based on Your Findings
Chapter 2 Resources
Examine Current Curricula
Before you can implement curriculum changes that integrate oral health, you’ll need to determine what, how, and where oral health is already being taught at your institution. The depth of your survey will depend on the level of change you hope to implement and the level of institutional support you have.
Consider scope. Decide which courses or program(s) you will analyze (i.e. nursing, speech-language pathology and audiology, physical therapy).
Recruit partners. Partner with faculty from these programs to collaborate on curriculum analysis.
Conduct your survey. Distribute a Curricular Mapping Template to all program directors or select faculty members, depending on the scope of your effort. The IOH template and sample cover letter may be modified for use at your institution. Review the surveys to create a baseline understanding of the current status of oral health integration in each targeted course or program.
Collaborate. Where possible, work with your partners to conduct a more extensive review of every course in the selected programs and determine what, if any, oral health topics are presently being taught. To accomplish this:
- Examine course syllabi.
- Consult with faculty members who teach the courses you are investigating.
- Look at course topics and materials to uncover hidden oral health curricula.
IOH at Northeastern University (NEU)
IOH undertook the curriculum mapping process as part of its broader effort to demonstrate how a single, interprofessional, oral health curriculum could be implemented across multiple health professions programs.
To begin, the IOH program director sat down with each program coordinator and reviewed every course in each of the targeted health professions’ programs. These reviews identified specific faculty who taught courses appropriate for oral health integration. The IOH program director then met with each of these faculty members to look at course content and determine ways to integrate oral health into their courses. While building relationships and assessing course content in detail, these one-on-one meetings also served as opportunities to introduce Smiles for Life to faculty and show them how to use it with their students and for their own professional development.
During the second year of the project, a personalized letter was sent to faculty who hadn’t yet integrated oral health into their courses to explain how this might be done and how Smiles for Life could be used. In addition, faculty were provided with course specific oral health resources.
Assess Faculty Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes About Oral Health
To help shape faculty development programs that will provide education and training around oral health integration, you’ll need to assess the current knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the faculty at your institution.
IOH designed a Faculty Oral Health Survey informed by the core competencies developed by HRSA as part of its 2014 Integration of Oral Health and Primary Care Practice initiative. You can modify the demographics section of the survey to fit your specific needs. The survey responses should provide a baseline understanding of the current knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the faculty at your institution. Those who plan to engage in institution-level change will want to consider additional ways of gathering data.
Faculty champions. Individuals working toward change at the course-level can use this survey to assess their own readiness for oral health integration.
Program pioneers. Individual faculty or a group of faculty who aim to integrate oral health into their professional program can use this survey as a one-time measure of faculty knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
Systems-wide change agents. An effort to take a similar measure across multiple professional programs will require the work of an interprofessional team. Team members can coordinate the dissemination and collection of a survey institution-wide, enlist faculty champions to encourage a healthy response, and conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews to gauge faculty attitudes and knowledge regarding oral health.
Response rate. Regardless of the level of change you seek, the success and accuracy of your survey will depend on your ability to achieve a high rate of response. For surveys conducted during educational activities, this is simply a matter of asking participants to answer questions before or after the session. For one-time measures of faculty knowledge conducted on a broader scale, however, you’ll need to make it as easy as possible for busy individuals to access the survey, respond to questions, and return it to you in a timely manner.
IOH at Northeastern University (NEU)
To assess faculty knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to oral health and primary care integration, IOH conducted a research study. The goal was to determine what types of faculty development training would be needed in order to incorporate oral health into all NEU Bouvé College of Health Sciences curricula.
Following Institutional Review Board approval, a web-based survey was distributed to 350 faculty members across nine academic programs (Health Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, Physician Assistant, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Health Informatics, Public Health, and Applied Psychology) and made available for four weeks from the date of administration.
The core competencies released by HRSA as part of its 2014 Integration of Oral Health and Primary Care Practice initiative informed the development of the survey tool, which was created and distributed through the Qualtrics® system. Faculty members willing to participate were sent a link through which to access the survey. Clicking on the link served to signal their consent.
The survey was paired with a raffle. Participants who wished to enter for the chance to win an iPad mini were asked to provide their names, email addresses, and phone numbers. At the end of the survey, all participants were asked to complete a short demographic questionnaire.
To learn more, see: Dolce MC, Holloman JL. Faculty Readiness for Oral Health Integration into Health Care Professional Education: A Pilot Study. Journal of Allied Health. (in press)
Assess Faculty Attitudes Toward Teamwork
Collaboration is key to integrating oral health across the health professions and to teaching students to work effectively in high-performing health care teams. But collaboration among faculty members is not always the norm, and at many institutions, health professions programs continue to operate in silos.
Before you embark on a program of integrating oral health in the curriculum, you’ll want to assess faculty attitudes towards collaboration and interprofessional team-based care. The results will guide you in creating faculty development programs targeted to the needs of your community.
To conduct your survey, consider using TeamSTEPPS®.
The TeamSTEPPS system. This widely respected training program offers a reliable, free survey tool for assessing faculty attitudes toward teamwork. The TeamSTEPPS® Teamwork Attitudes Questionnaire (T-TAQ) looks at five core components of teamwork that will help you gauge the culture at your institution.
- Team structure
- Leadership
- Situation monitoring
- Mutual support
- Communication
TeamSTEPPS was developed jointly by the Department of Defense and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to improve the quality and safety of patient care. To learn more about the system, which includes a full curriculum and other resources, visit the TeamSTEPPS page for professionals.
The process. T-TAQ is a paper-based questionnaire. To ensure the reliability and validity of the results, it should not be modified. Background questions regarding respondents’ education, experience, age, and the like are not included on the T-TAQ. Institutions that want to track particular characteristics may develop additional questions for inclusion on a separate page. As with any survey, a high response rate will help ensure accurate results. For further guidance in how to use the questionnaire, see the TeamSTEPPS® Teamwork Attitudes Questionnaire Manual.
Analyze and Interpret Data
Once you’ve collected data regarding the level of oral health integration at your institution and the degree of faculty knowledge and openness toward interprofessional collaboration, you’ll need to interpret your findings.
Again, the depth of your analysis will hinge on the degree of change you aim to implement and the resources you have at your disposal.
Faculty champions. Those who have access to survey data and want to integrate interprofessional oral health content into individual courses can use that data to determine appropriate changes on a course-by-course basis. Data can also be used by individual faculty to advocate for broader change. Faculty who do not have access to survey data can evaluate individual syllabi for targeted courses to determine areas where oral health content could be integrated and make changes accordingly.
Program pioneers. For broader assessments, data analysis will be a collaborative effort that might involve a combination of faculty champions and graduate students or volunteers who can review findings and identify programming needs.
Systems-wide change agents. Institution-wide assessments will require an interprofessional team of faculty to collate and review results and apply them to programming needs across the professions.
Develop a Plan Based on Your Findings
Once your analysis is complete, put your new knowledge into action. Based on your findings, work with your partners or interprofessional team to:
- Discuss findings and prioritize needs.
- Develop a plan to address identified gaps in faculty knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
- Create educational programming (see Chapter 4. Faculty Development and modify the workshops according to the needs highlighted by your data analysis). Be sure to consider these variables:
- Audience characteristics
- Scope of resources (budget, space, supplies)
- Session format
- Who will run the session
- How you will assess the training
- Keeping participants engaged post training
- Develop an awareness campaign that responds to the needs of your institution (see Chapter 3. Create Awareness and Secure Support).
- Evaluate these efforts and share the results with participants, partners, and institutional decision makers.
IOH at Northeastern University (NEU)
Data regarding faculty oral health knowledge, skills, and attitudes were used to inform faculty development initiatives. To address knowledge and skill gaps, IOH developed and implemented a series of hands-on oral health workshops. Faculty from multiple professions took part in the workshops, which were taught by the IOH program director and faculty from the Forsyth School of Dental Hygiene at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Supplies for the workshops were minimal and consisted of a PowerPoint presentation, gloves, gauze, and protective eyewear. Smiles for Life was used to guide the development of the workshops and provided as a resource for further professional development.
Data regarding faculty teamwork attitudes were used as part of a systematic evaluation to determine readiness for new IPE initiatives. The T-TAQ survey indicated that faculty attitudes toward teamwork were positive, but that opportunities for additional teamwork training might be warranted.