A blueprint for interprofessional learning

Abstract

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been promoted as a method to enhance the ability of health professionals to learn to work together. This article examines several approaches to learning that can help IPE fulfill its expectations. The first is aimed at the transfer of learning novel situations and involves two ideas. Students need to be challenged with progressively more complex tasks and those tasks need to reflect the reality in which they will be working. Second, the learning situation needs to be structured using the five elements of best-practice cooperative learning: positive interdependence, face-to-face promotive interaction, individual accountability, interpersonal and small-group skills, and group processing. Finally, the learning process itself needs to be approached from an experiential learning framework cycling through the four-stage model of planning, doing, observing and reflecting. By using increasingly complex and relevant cases in cooperative groups with an experiential learning process interprofessional education can be successful.

Internal Medicine Residents’ Perceptions of Team-Based Care and its Educational Value in the Continuity Clinic: A Qualitative Study

“…IP team-members participating in shared problem solving in simulations or the classroom, called collaborative learning, is generally thought to be the preferred method of learning the skills of IP teamwork and is usually well received among trainees. 24 On-the-job learning in a working clinic could be viewed as an even more effective form of collaborative learning. However, in real-world practice, a tension exists between learning the skills of IP teamwork and providing clinical care.…”

Interprofessional Education and Practice Guide No. 6: Developing practice-based interprofessional learning using a short placement model

“…We have learned that experience is never enough to ensure learning, as students left unsupervised and/or undirected often fail to make meaning from what they are doing. The students need to pool their understandings and consider the strengths and limitations of the services comparing service users and practitioners' priorities (Schön 1987;D'Eon 2005). The students should be directed to relevant theories and policies that underpin their different profession-specific responses.…”

“…Indeed this has been emphasised by interprofessional leaders, who discuss the cogent role of learning based on actual real life situations, so that students see the complexity and understand the responsibility of different professional team members (Barr, 2002;D'Eon, 2005). In practice students observe professional social interactions which may be conversations in corridors and common staff spaces demonstrating the importance of positive professional relationships (Gittell, 2000;Bleakley, 2013;Gregory, Hopwood & Boud, 2014).…”

A Quality Improvement Activity to Promote Interprofessional Collaboration Among Health Professions Students

“…Scheduling and resource constraints precluded the use of workplace-based experiences; thus, an intermediate lecture and paperbased approach involving multiple health disciplines was deemed most appropriate to build on students' existing knowledge and skills. 21 …”