Readiness for interprofessional education among health profession lecturers at a University in Vietnam: A cross-sectional study

Interprofessional education is acknowledged as an efficacious strategy for fostering collaboration among healthcare professionals, especially in developing countries where interdisciplinarity and cooperation among healthcare practitioners are notably deficient. The present study aimed to investigate the readiness among medical, pharmacy, public health, and nursing faculties for development of an IPE curriculum at a university in Vietnam. Employing a quantitative approach, the revised version of the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) questionnaire, comprising 19 items, was utilized to gather data from sixty-nine lecturers, including 26 medicine, 23 pharmacy, 11 public health, and 9 nursing faculties. Total scores and subscores (pertaining to teamwork and collaboration, professional identity, and roles and responsibilities) were subjected to comparison using the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests. Findings revealed a high level of readiness among all faculty members toward IPE with little difference between each faculty. However, nursing lecturers exhibited a more favorable attitude toward the roles and responsibilities associated with IPE in contrast to their counterparts in the medicine faculty (1.89 +/- 1.02 vs 3.15 +/- 0.63, p = 0.0048). Further study with deep interview methods should be done to explore the barriers of faculty members as well as of the leadership in developing IPE.