Assessment of Interprofessional Team Collaboration Scale (AITCS): Development and Testing of the Instrument

INTRODUCTION: Many health professionals believe they practice collaboratively. Providing insight into their actual level of collaboration requires a means to assess practice within health settings. This chapter reports on the development, testing, and refinement process for the Assessment of Interprofessional Team Collaboration Scale (AITCS). There is a paucity of literature and measurement tools addressing interprofessional collaborative team performance and the nature of effective teamwork processes and patient roles within collaborative teams. These gaps limit our knowledge about how health care teams form and function. Instruments are therefore needed to assess collaborative relationships. METHODS: The AITCS, with its 47 items within 4 subscales (partnership, cooperation, coordination, and shared decision making) and assessed on a 5-point Likert scale, was administered to a total of 125 practitioners from 7 health care teams practicing within a variety of settings, in 2 provinces in Canada. RESULTS: Principal components and factor analysis of data resulted in 37 items loading onto 3 factors, explaining 61.02% of the variance. The internal consistency estimates for reliability of each subscale ranged from 0.80 to 0.97, with an overall reliability of 0.98. Thus, the AITCS is a reliable and valid instrument. DISCUSSION: The psychometric analysis of this instrument supports its value in measuring collaboration within teams and when patients are included as team members. The AITCS can be applied to continuing professional education interventions to determine change over time. It has limitations to the Canadian context and within the settings where participants practiced. Further test and retest reliability and longitudinal study application is needed.