Examining Interprofessional Education Through the Lens of Interdisciplinarity: Power, Knowledge and New Ontological Subjects

Abstract

Interprofessional education (IPE) -students of different professions learning together, from and about each other -is increasingly common in health professional degrees. Despite its explicit aims of transforming identities, practices and relationships within/across health professions, IPE remains under-theorised sociologically, with most IPE scholarship focussed on evaluating specific interventions. In particular, the significance of a shared knowledge base for shaping professional power and subjectivity in IPE has been overlooked. In this paper we begin to develop a framework for theorising IPE in allied health, by drawing parallels with a cognate area in which there has already been fruitful conceptual development: interdisciplinarity. Specifically, we offer a worked example of how the two areas may be brought into dialogue, by deploying Barry, Born and Weszkalnys' (2008) conceptualisation of interdisciplinarity as a lens for understanding IPE. Following Barry et al. (2008) we delineate a number of 'modes' and 'logics' of knowledge-production that emerge both in IPE literature and in our own empirical study of IPE. Our empirical data are drawn from 32 semi-structured interviews with 19 allied health students participating in an IPE curriculum at one Australian university. Findings point to the emergence of interprofessional practitioner identities among students that have the potential to undermine traditional epistemological boundaries and transcend role-based distinctions in future health profession(al)s. We argue that Barry et al.'s 'logic of ontology' sheds light on previously unidentified processes of transformation within IPE, and offers a theoretical framework that can explain the importance of a shared pan-professional knowledge base for the reflexive individual construction of new interprofessional ontological subjects.

Autonomous motivation explains interprofessional education outcomes

“…IPE’s popularity is shown by an increasing momentum in scholarship and publication on this topic over the last few decades. However, despite the significant development in IPE literature over the years, IPE studies have been criticised for seemingly falling short in terms of theoretical rigours of conceptualising research agenda from being atheoretical, under‐theorised, to limited theory application 1‐5 suggesting a dire need to problematise IPE and practice activities 6 . Paradis and Whitehead 7 (p1460) responded that ‘anchoring education for collaboration in more robust theories of how the professions actually come together will most certainly improve the empirical success of such programs’.…”

The Resurgence of Medical Education in Sociology: A Return to Our Roots and an Agenda for the Future

“…As a result, many scholars have called for more critical social science in medical curricula (Kendall et al 2018; Sales and Schlaff 2010). Others point out, however, that curricular reform may not dismantle existing power relationships in academic medicine and health care and that the curriculum—hidden or otherwise—does not generally address power and conflict (Michalec and Hafferty 2013; Olson and Brosnan 2017; Paradis and Whitehead 2018).…”

Interprofessional and multiprofessional approaches in quality improvement education

“…However, it is still important to identify the role that multiprofessional education can play in achieving educational outcomes. Furthermore, recent findings (Olson and Brosnan 2017) have raised the possibility of multiprofessional and interprofessional education approaches having overlapping outcomes. Sociology of professions provides a lens to understanding the myriad of professionally related issues influencing the planning, and range of outcomes, of an education program.…”

“…According to Baker et al's findings, healthcare professionals' participation and physicians' lack of participation in interprofessional education could reflect their efforts to advance or protect their position in the hierarchy of professions, respectively. Olson and Brosnan (2017) used Barry et al's (2008) conceptualization of interdisciplinarity to study the process of interprofessional education through a focus on the relationship between knowledge, identity and professional power in an interprofessional education curriculum for allied health students. Their findings suggest that learning a shared curriculum in a multiprofessional way can contribute to the development of interprofessional practitioner identities that undermine traditional professional boundaries.…”

“…Multiprofessional education occurs when members of two or more professions learn alongside one another in parallel (Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education 2017). Multiprofessional education is positioned as having different educational goals than interprofessional education, however recent research has demonstrated the potential for overlapping outcomes of these two approaches (Olson and Brosnan 2017).…”