Development of an interprofessional collaboration competency scale for children with medical complexity

OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate an interprofessional collaboration competency scale for children with medical complexity (ICC-CMC). These children have the most complex healthcare needs, complicated chronic conditions, severe functional limitations and often need a considerable amount of healthcare resources. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: The self-administered ICC-CMC questionnaire was developed based on a literature review and 12 expert interviews. PARTICIPANTS: Participants were 2347 interprofessionals from the health, medical, welfare and education fields in seven prefectures in Japan. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): We used Cronbach’s alpha values to assess the internal consistency of the scale. Construct validity was confirmed with confirmatory factor analysis, and an existing scale was administered to assess criterion-related validity. RESULTS: In total, 378 professionals provided valid responses. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified 12 items on three factors: ‘sharing needs assessment skills’, ‘resource development skills’ and ‘creative networking skills’. The final model showed good fit on four indices (eg, goodness of fit index: 0.925). The Cronbach’s alpha for the entire scale was 0.93 and was above 0.80 for each factor. The correlation coefficient between the existing scale and the ICC-CMC was 0.72 (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The ICC-CMC demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and validity. The scale has potential use in advancing professionals’ individual practice and team performance in interprofessional collaboration. In addition, the ICC-CMC has the potential of improving satisfaction and outcomes for children with medical complexity and their families.