Towards a measurement of internalization of collaboration scripts in the medical context – results of a pilot study

Background: Collaboration as a key qualification in medical education and everyday routine in clinical care can substantially contribute to improving patient safety. Internal collaboration scripts are conceptualized as organized - yet adaptive – knowledge that can be used in specific situations in professional everyday life. This study examines the level of internalization of collaboration scripts in medicine. Internalization is understood as fast retrieval of script information. Goal: The goals of the current study were the assessment of collaborative information, which is part of collaboration scripts, and the development of a methodology for measuring the level of internalization of collaboration scripts in medicine. Method: For the contrastive comparison of internal collaboration scripts, 20 collaborative novices (medical students in their final year) and 20 collaborative experts (physicians with specialist degrees in internal medicine or anesthesiology) were included in the study. Eight typical medical collaborative situations as shown on a photo or video were presented to the participants for five seconds each. Afterwards, the participants were asked to describe what they saw on the photo or video. Based on the answers, the amount of information belonging to a collaboration script (script-information) was determined and the time each participant needed for answering was measured. In order to measure the level of internalization, script-information per recall time was calculated. Results: As expected, collaborative experts stated significantly more script-information than collaborative novices. As well, collaborative experts showed a significantly higher level of internalization. Conclusions: Based on the findings of this research, we conclude that our instrument can discriminate between collaboration novices and experts. It therefore can be used to analyze measures to foster subject-specific competency in medical education.