Observing Inter-Professional Videos: Impact of Collaboration Between Physicians and Psychologists on Attitude and Knowledge Acquisition

BACKGROUND: Inter-professional collaboration (IPC) is an important prerequisite for successful patient care. Even though inter-professional education (IPE) is increasingly common in undergraduate medical education, few IPE approaches explicitly address the IPC among medical students and students of psychology. IPE videos can be used to give learners the opportunity to gather relevant knowledge from different professional perspectives. So far it has been unclear whether it is enough when the topic of the video itself is inter-professional or if it is necessary for experts from different professions explicitly to appear in the video. METHODS: In an online experiment, medical students watched 1 of 2 videos about Parkinson’s disease (PD) and the care of PD patients. The information was either provided by protagonists from only 1 profession (ie, physicians; mono-professional condition) or provided by protagonists from 2 different professions (ie, physicians and a psychologist; inter-professional condition). Attitude toward inter-professional interaction and learning, evaluation of the entertaining and illustrative character of the video, attitude toward physicians and psychologists, importance of IPC, evaluation of psychological treatment support, and knowledge acquisition served as dependent variables. RESULTS: The analysis was based on 140 participants (74 in the mono-, 66 in the inter-professional condition). We found that the inter-professional video was perceived to be more entertaining than the mono-professional video (t((138)) = −2.227; P = .028; d = 0.38). The inter-professional video was also considered to be more illustrative (t((138)) = −6.269; P < .001; d = 1.06). Moreover, participants improved their attitude toward physicians by watching the video (F((1,138)) = 4.860, P < .001, η(2)(p) = 0.11), but they did not change their attitude toward psychologists (P = .146). Participants who watched the inter-professional video considered IPC to be more important than participants who watched the mono-professional video (t((138)) = −7.954; P < .001; d = 1.354). Finally, the inter-professional video led to better performance in the knowledge test (t((138)) = −2.285; P = .024; d = 0.04). CONCLUSION: Inter-professional videos showing explicitly the appearance of experts from different professions come along with several advantages. We discuss the implications of their application in educational practice. TRIAL REGISTRATION: The study was pre-registered on the pre-registration platform AsPredicted (aspredicted.org) before we began data collection (registration number: #33143). The pre-registration document can be accessed via the following link: https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=gd5hd8.