Abstracts

Rationale: Specialized epilepsy centers have been developed to provide an accurate diagnosis of epilepsy and appropriate treatments. There has been emphasis on the necessity and importance of a collaborative interdisciplinary care team to achieve optimal epilepsy care. Beyond the professional knowledge and expert skills, it is indispensable that team members share a common set of beliefs regarding the delivery of optimal epilepsy care. Understanding the nature of individual and shared team-based knowledge is critical to organizational performance. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of individual and team knowledge of epilepsy care professionals towards the quality of epilepsy care. Methods: In this pilot study a concept mapping method was used to explore the epilepsy care professionals' knowledge. The study invited ten epilepsy team members in the UAB pediatric epilepsy center including 2 epileptologists, 2 neurosurgeons with specialization for epilepsy surgery, 3 nurse practitioners, 1 registered nurse, and 2 electroencephalogram (EEG) technologists. Participants were asked to answer the open-ended question, "What factors do you think influence the quality of epilepsy care?" They made out the lists of factors and the reasons why they considered those important. They also ranked the factors in the order of importance. With the participants' written descriptions, the author constructed individual concept maps representing knowledge structures as the relationships between concepts in a graphic form. Each concept map was revised through each participant's confirmation. Content analysis of maps was conducted and the results were used to produce a team concept map. Results: A total of 227 concepts were found in ten participants' descriptions. The median was 25 (minimum 12 and maximum 28). Among all concepts, the total numbers of factors were 96. The median was 9 (minimum 6 and maximum 14). Detected concepts and factors were grouped into 12 categories including access to epilepsy care, awareness and education, caregivers, compliance, diagnosis, epilepsy care professionals, patient-provider relationships, patients' quality of care, primary physicians, treatment, support groups, and others. For the concepts, ‘treatment' was the most common concept with 17.6 percent share (40/227). This was followed by ‘access to epilepsy care' and ‘epilepsy care professionals' with 16.7 percent (38/227) and 13.7 percent (31/227), respectively. Concerning the factors, ‘access to epilepsy care (23/96)' was the most common factor (24.0%). ‘Epilepsy care professionals (16/96)' was the second most common factor (16.7%). With 14.6 percent share, ‘treatment (14/96)' and ‘awareness and education (14/96)' were in the third place. Conclusions: This pilot study showed the potential use of concept mapping methods to extract individual and team knowledge. Twelve categorized concepts and eleven factors were found shared among team members. This study can be the base to compare team knowledge with the consensus of experts group.