Characterizing Research About Interprofessional Education Within Pharmacy
Objective. To determine how pharmacy interprofessional education (IPE) has been studied, namely which disciplines have engaged in pharmacy IPE research initiatives, the research methodologies that have been used to study pharmacy IPE, and journals that have published pharmacy IPE studies. Findings. In the 145 IPE studies included in the review, the authors represented 13 different disciplines (3.2 ±1.5 disciplines/study). Pharmacy authors most commonly published with co-authors from nursing, medicine, and health management and support and most frequently served as first author and as last author. IPE activities involved 4.0 ± 1.9 student disciplines with 211.8 ± 280.1 students, most commonly involving nursing (n = 104, 71.7%), medicine (n = 102, 70.3%), and health management and support students (n = 50, 34.5%). Most studies did not include an author from each student discipline involved in the IPE (n = 88, 60.7%). Further a majority of studies used non-randomized groupings (n=103, 71.0%) with quantitative data (n = 74, 51.0%) and most were published in an interprofessional journal (n = 65, 44.8%) or pharmacy-specific journal (n = 45, 31.0%). Summary. This review summarizes how pharmacy IPE has been studied and highlights opportunities for advancing IPE research and practice.