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A goal of interprofessional education (IPE) is to prepare "collaborative-ready" healthcare professionals to ultimately improve health outcomes. The objective of our study was to explore student-reported factors that influence collaboration within our longitudinal IPE experience. Twenty-five first-year pharmacy students and 50 first-year medical students enrolled in IPE courses were invited to participate in three focus groups. Focus group responses were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and applied to a qualitative thematic analysis. Eighteen students participated with six students in each group. Compared to the medical students, the pharmacy students were younger (22 vs. 26 years), had earned only a high school diploma, and had less healthcare experience. Emergent themes that students reported revealed various factors that can facilitate and inhibit collaboration among student participants. These findings can inform curricular redesign to focus on: clarifying provider roles, requiring ongoing preceptor development, enhancing course orientation, and coordinating student schedules to better prepare "collaborative-ready" students.

Objective. To prepare first-year and second-year pharmacy and medical students to build effective collaborative health care teams by participating in an interprofessional experiential 6-semester course series.Design. An interprofessional experiential course series was designed using a variety of teaching methods to achieve both interprofessional and experiential learning outcomes. A standardized objective behavioral assessment was developed to measure team performance of interprofessional communication and teamwork. In addition, student perceptions were measured using a validated instrument. Assessment. A majority of teams demonstrated appropriate competence with respect to interprofessional communication and teamwork. Additionally, a majority of students expressed positive perceptions of interprofessional collaboration with respect to teamwork, roles and responsibilities, and patient outcomes.Conclusion. An interprofessional experiential course series can be successfully implemented to achieve both interprofessional and experiential learning outcomes. Highly collaborative teams and positive student perceptions provide evidence of achievement of interprofessional education learning outcomes.Keywords: interprofessional education, behaviors, perceptions, SPICE, assessment INTRODUCTIONExperiential education is a methodology involving the incorporation of learners into direct practice experiences and guided reflective observations with the goal of increasing student knowledge and professional abilities such as skills, attitudes, and behaviors. 1 Interprofessional education (IPE) is a pedagogical approach that engages students of various health professions, dedicated to the introduction, reinforcement, and mastery of core competencies for provision of patient care in a collaborative team environment. 2 Both experiential education and IPE are integral components of the doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) curriculum supported by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy's Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education (CAPE). 3 Additionally, the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) outlines these required standards and specifically states that all students should competently "participate in experiential educational activities with prescribers/student prescribers and other student/professional health care team members, including face-to-face interactions that are designed to advance interprofessional team effectiveness." 4 Several instructional design formats for the delivery of IPE are reported in the literature. A review conducted by Abu-Rish and colleagues reviewed 83 eligible studies and found small group discussion and problem-based learning to be the most commonly used strategies, followed by experiential-based clinical teaching, simulation-based learning, and various other educational interventions. 5 Because of the variety of instructional design formats employed and the varying frequency of these activities throughout the curriculum (ie, one-time activities vs multiple activities throughout the ...

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