Group Conformity in Interprofessional Teams
Abstract
Within the multidisciplinary team environment, professionals bring varying levels of experience, authority, and responsibility: examining how team members interact is critical to ensure the highest standard of patient care. One type of influence in this environment is peer pressure, whereby an individual changes his or her own behavior to match the responses of others in a group. Known as conformity, this body of research, which spans 60 years since Asch’s (1951) seminal work, has only recently been examined in medical education (Beran et al., 2012). When the individual conforms to an incorrect diagnosis or plan for treatment, the safety of the patient may be compromised, contributing to the burden of adverse events. Given the ubiquity of collaborative practice in healthcare, the research presented in this dissertation is about succumbing to peer pressure - and the greater pressures experienced by nursing as compared to medical students to conform to a procedural task.
This thesis is divided into four papers. The first paper is a narrative review, the second paper is a methods paper, the third paper compares the difference between medical and nursing students’ rate of conformity on a vital sign skill task, and the fourth paper examines whether conforming on the vital signs task is related to their clinical interpretations. The study is an adaption of the original Asch design to recreate conformity within an interprofessional simulated environment.
The findings from the four papers presented in this dissertation, suggest that social pressure may prevent nursing and medical students from questioning incorrect information within interprofessional environments. If health professional students are making clinical decisions based on the consensus of the group, this is a critical issue for patient safety, as we cannot negate the fact that these students will one day be future doctors and nurses and will be working with real patients. To improve teamwork and collaboration amongst medicine and nursing in practice, Interprofessional Education (IPE) curriculum needs to teach students how to overcome barriers within the medical hierarchy, by encouraging students to question and politely challenge what seems to be incorrect information.
Description
Keywords
Education, Education
Citation
Kaba, A. (2016). Group Conformity in Interprofessional Teams (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26329