With increasing interest and research into interprofessional learning, there is scope to more deeply understand what happens when students from different professions live and study in the same location. This study aimed to explore the issue of co-location and its effects on how students learn to work with other professions. The setting for this study was a rural health education facility in Australia with close links to local health care and community services. Philosophical hermeneutics informed the research method. Interviews were undertaken with 29 participants, including students, academic educators and clinical supervisors in diagnostic radiography, medicine, nursing, nutrition and dietetics, pharmacy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech pathology. Photo-elicitation was used to facilitate participant engagement with the topic. The findings foreground the value of interprofessional rapport building opportunities for students learning to work together. Enabled by the proximity of different professions in shared educational, clinical and social spaces, interprofessional rapport building was contingent on contextual conditions (balance of professions, shared spaces and adequate time) and individual's interpersonal capabilities (being interested, being inclusive, developing interpersonal bonds, giving and receiving respect, bringing a sense of own profession and being patient-centred). In the absence of these conditions and capabilities, negative professional stereotypes may be inadvertently re-enforced. From these findings suggestions are made for nurturing interprofessional rapport building opportunities to enable students of different professions to learn to work together.
Although a core component of many current health-care directions, interprofessional collaboration continues to challenge educators and health professionals. This paper aims to inform the development of collaborative practice by illuminating the experiences of collaborating within rehabilitation teams. The researchers focused on experiences that transcended team members' professional role categorizations in order to bring individuals and their lived experiences to the forefront. An inclusive view of "teams" and "collaboration" was adopted and the complexity and multifaceted nature of collaborating were explored through a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Semi-structured interviews were used to gather data about experiences of collaborating in nine rehabilitation teams. Sixty-six team members across nine teams were interviewed. Eight interdependent dimensions, core to the experience of collaborating, emerged from the analysis of the data. Five dimensions expressed interpersonal dimensions of endeavor: engaging positively with other peoples' diversity; entering into the form and feel of the team; establishing ways of communicating and working together; envisioning together frameworks for patients' rehabilitation and effecting changes in people and situations. Three reviewing dimensions, reflexivity, reciprocity and responsiveness, operated across the endeavor dimensions. By identifying meaning structures of the experience of collaborating, this study highlights the importance of seeing beyond team members' professional affiliations and being aware of their contextualized interpersonal and activity-related collaborating capabilities.
Similar to other professions, pharmacy educators use workplace learning opportunities to prepare students for collaborative practice. Thus, collaborative relationships between educators of different professions are important for planning, implementing and evaluating interprofessional learning strategies and role modelling interprofessional collaboration within and across university and workplace settings. However, there is a paucity of research exploring educators’ interprofessional relationships. Using collaborative dialogical inquiry we explored the nature of educators’ interprofessional relationships in a co-located setting. Data from interprofessional focus groups and semi-structured interviews were interpreted to identify themes that transcended the participants’ professional affiliations. Educators’ interprofessional collaborative relationships involved the development and interweaving of five interpersonal behaviours: being inclusive of other professions; developing interpersonal connections with colleagues from other professions; bringing a sense of own profession in relation to other professions; giving and receiving respect to other professions; and being learner-centred for students’ collaborative practice. Pharmacy educators, like other educators, need to ensure that interprofessional relationships are founded on positive experiences rather than vested in professional interests.
Interprofessional collaboration is an important aspect of delivering healthcare. However, helping students learn to work with other health professions continues to pose challenges. Students' interprofessional relationships are an important aspect of learning to work with other professions. The complexity of educators' interprofessional relationships is less easily recognised. Existing relationships between educators were the intentional foundation underpinning the development and implementation of a recent interprofessional workplace learning initiative over 18 months involving undergraduate students from speech pathology (n = 12) and nutrition and dietetics (n = 18) programs. As part of a larger collaborative inquiry, educators involved in the initiative explored the nature of interprofessional relationships involved in developing, delivering and participating in the initiative. The aim was to develop a deeper understanding of such interprofessional relationships in order to provide guidance for ongoing development of students' and educators' collaborative practice. Transcripts of five focus groups undertaken with students (n = 5), academic educators (n = 4) and clinical educators (n = 4) were compiled into a text set and interpreted using tools of philosophical hermeneutics. Findings of this study were iteratively dialogued with earlier findings of the collaborative dialogical inquiry to ensure "fusion of horizons" between studies. The three interpreted themes transcended professional affiliations: facilitating interprofessional mutuality, appreciating the multifaceted nature of "respect" and considering the visibility of interprofessional relationships. The themes highlighted the importance of educators' ongoing development and understanding of interprofessional relationships as they help students learn to work with other professions. Based on a practice-based education framework, we pose reflective questions for educators to inform their ongoing development. We conclude that it is important for all those involved in healthcare education to embrace the responsibility of developing interpro-A. Croker et al. 1730 fessional relationships in an ongoing manner and not view the development of interprofessional relationships solely as the domain of students.
Being explicit about educators' collaborative relationships may have potential to improve the transferability of IPE strategies to other contexts. A flowchart is presented to encourage authors to: (i) consider how to portray educators' collaborative relationships, and (ii) reflect on how these collaborative relationships may impact on the success, or otherwise, of their IPE projects.
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