Interprofessional education and practice guide: designing ethics-orientated interprofessional education for health and social care students

Abstract

Health and social care professionals are required to work together to deliver person-centred care. Professionals therefore find themselves making decisions within multidisciplinary teams. For educators, there has been a call to bring students from differing professions together to learn to enable more effective teamwork, interprofessional communication, and collaborative practice. This multidisciplinary working is complicated by the increasingly complex nature of ethical dilemmas that health and social care professionals face. It is therefore widely recognised that the teaching and learning of ethics within health and social care courses is valuable. In this paper, we briefly make the casein support of teaching and learning health and social care ethics through the medium of interprofessional education (IPE). The purpose of this paper is provide guidance to educators intending to design ethicsorientated IPE for health and social care students. The guidance is based on the ongoing experiences of designing and implementing ethics-orientated IPE across five departments within two universities located in the North of England over a five year period. Descriptions of the ethics-orientated IPE activities are included in the guide, along with key resources recommended.

Making the (Business) Case for Clinical Ethics Support in the UK

“…One particular teaching activity within the medical school are the Clinical Ethics Forums, which introduce the concept of clinical ethics support to social work, medicine, and clinical psychology students (Machin et al 2019 ). The Forums are multiprofessional to reflect the membership of real-life clinical ethics committees, and students use common ethical frameworks, such as Four Principles (Beauchamp & Childress 1989 ), Four Quadrants (Jonsen et al 1982 ), and Seedhouse Grid (Seedhouse 2009 ), to analyse and discuss their own dilemmas they have experienced during their training.…”

Health and social care professionals’ experiences of collaborative planning—Applying the person‐centred practice framework

“…In Sweden, as in many other countries, education and training are usually offered separately for each profession (Hägg‐Martinell, Hult, Henriksson, & Kiessling, 2019). If students and professionals learn from, with and about each other during education and training, they will be better prepared to deliver integrated and person‐centred care during practice (Machin et al., 2019). There is a need to adapt the education and training of healthcare and social care professionals to correspond with integrated and person‐centred practice (Nolte, 2017).…”

Learning to swallow together: Medical and speech and language therapy student interprofessional learning about dysphagia

“…We erroneously assumed that student experience in working effectively in within-discipline groups would automatically transfer to cross-disciplinary learning. Machin et al (2019) note student groups commonly feel anxious about revealing their potential lack of knowledge in IPE. Our findings concur, suggesting the need for preparatory support regarding expectations to reduce vulnerability when sharing knowledge with other disciplines.…”