Evaluation of effectiveness educational based on inter-professional approach on rate of empathy and inter-professional collaboration among nurses and physicians in emergency department during the Covid-19 pandemic

Improving the quality of providing health services on the one hand requires the participation and inter-professional cooperation of the care and medical team, and on the other hand, empathy of the care and medical team is considered essential to the provision of quality care. But participation in care and medical team always faces challenges which it has become a serious challenge in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Goal: In this regard, the aim of this study was evaluation of effectiveness educational based on inter-professional approach on rate of empathy and inter-professional collaboration among nurses and physicians in emergency department during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The cross-sectional research was applied research and research method was quasi experimental with pretest-posttest design and control group. The statistical population of the study consisted of nurses and physicians of Bahman hospital's emergency department with at least 5 years of work experience. That 40 of them were selected by available method and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups (20 in each group). Then, two separate two-day workshops with the same conditions were held for the experimental and control groups, so that the experimental group was given inter-professional training and the control group was given single-professional training. The tool used was readiness for inter-professional learning scale (Parsell & Bligh, 1999) and scale of physician empathy-health professionals (Jefferson et al, 1987). Data were analyzed by ANCOVA in SPSS, Version 26. 

The Findings showed that as compared to the nurses and physicians who did not receive this program, nurses and physicians that received this program by using the inter-professional education had a significant impact leading to an increase in the empathy and inter-professional collaboration of the nurses and physicians in emergency department (FEmpathy =20. 846, FInter-professional collaboration =27.184; P<0.0001). The effect of using the inter-professional education on empathy and inter-professional collaboration was 36 and 43 percent.

Therefore, the results showed that inter-professional education lead to significant increase in empathy and inter-professional collaboration among nurses and physicians in emergency department during the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to the obtained results, improving the quality of providing health services in emergency department during the Covid-19 pandemic depends on increasing their level of empathy and inter-professional collaboration among nurses and physicians that can be achieved through inter-professional education.