Do Interprofessional Educational Programmes on Eating Disorders Provide Proximal and Distal Benefits? Findings from a National Cohort Collected from 1998 to 2010

Abstract

Background: Many programs are launched aiming to raise knowledge and competence in treating eating disorders, yet few of them have been evaluated.

Methods and Findings: Using a pre-post and one-year repeated measures design we evaluated a 17-month interprofessional education program (Body and Self-Esteem) comprising a national cohort of participants (n = 845) enrolled from 1998 to 2010. The purpose of the program is to raise health professionals’ 1) knowledge, 2) confidence, 3) clinical competence, and 4) to promote an understanding of how patient care can be organized in an interdisciplinary fashion. The program format consists of five to six one- to three-day seminars with plenary lectures, and four to six closed network groups. The detected changes in all four outcomes were unrelated to program-irrelevant covariates. Program satisfaction was high, and on par with initial expectations.

Conclusions: Limited by the fact that a randomized controlled design was impossible to use, a reasonable conclusion is that the program may have provided both immediate and longer-term benefits.