Clinical skills as a vehicle for interprofessional learning

Abstract

the WHO clearly requests a commitment to building IPE into new and existing healthrelated curriculaEditor's note: We previously published a toolbox article on interprofessional education (IPE) in February 2016 (reference number 5 in this paper). Interprofessional education is a global phenomenon, with interprofessional networks established in sub-Saharan Africa, Japan, the UK, Canada, the USA, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand, and a South American network likely to come into effect soon. Many health professional education accreditation bodies now mandate that IPE should be included in curricula. It is therefore timely to present a different perspective.. In this toolbox the authors discuss six steps that they feel should be considered if IPE is to be sustainable once developed. The content is based on 7 years of experience at the University of East Anglia, and focuses on the delivery of interprofessional clinical skills sessions. There are many different ways in which interprofessional learning activities may be introduced into health professional programmes. They should be aligned with defined learning outcomes, which typically include teamwork and collaborative skills, amongst others. The main commonality required for IPE is that at least two health and social care professionals are learning interactively 'with, from and about each other', with the aim of ultimately improving patient care. The scenario-based clinical tasks described below are just one example of IPE in action.

Rethinking assessment for interprofessional learning during COVID-19: steering a middle course

“…Availability and reliability of IT equipment and confidence in their use are important enablers of sustainable online interprofessional education assessment; on the other hand the challenges acknowledged within the case studies, including lack of confidence in using equipment, varied availability, reliability or usage of functions such as cameras, can all present as significant barriers. This impacted for some on the ability to provide equitable, impactful interprofessional learning experiences for students, where interaction and authentic experiences are key to actual interprofessional collaborative practice within health and social care settings (Barr and Low, 2013;Webb et al, 2019). These challenges also extended to assessment, where challenges with technology impacted for some higher education institutions on the ability to assess students' interprofessional learning.…”