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Abstract
The workplace setting is ideal for health care students on placement to develop interprofessional competencies through relevant, authentic and engaging interprofessional learning (IPL) experiences. Stand-alone structured IPL programs, where the primary focus is on IPL, are often labour intensive, logistically difficult to timetable and challenging to sustain. A practical, scalable and sustainable approach to promoting IPL is to build IPL experiences into each disciplines regular placements. Thus, IPL becomes part of usual placement practice, rather than being treated separately. This approach capitalizes on currently under-utilized informal IPL opportunities within the workplace. We have used an educational design research methodology to develop and evaluate a stakeholder-informed set of authentic, practical and relevant IPL activities for use by students and their educators when on placement. Through an iterative cyclic process utilizing surveys, focus groups, workshops and interviews with students, placement site educators and academics, we have developed a publicly available interactive website containing the IPL activities. Student learning data are captured via an online form at https://health-ipl.sydney.edu.au/. Importantly, we have extracted a set of design principles that enable others to build on the learnings from this study. Future analytic data collected from our website will enable this approach to IPL to have impact in the longer term.
Keywords: interprofessional learning, informal learning, clinical placement
INTRODUCTION
Within health care curricula, interprofessional learning (IPL) is widely recognized as an essential graduate capability on entering the workplace (Frenk et al. 2010; World Health Organization 2010). We adopt the widely used definition of IPL to be when two or more students, learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes' (World Health Organization 2010, p.13). On graduation, our health care students should understand, value and respect other professional roles, place the patient/client at the centre of health care delivery, and be confident and competent in integrating the skills, knowledge and perspectives of others when providing patient/client care (O'Keefe, Henderson & Chick 2017; Schmitt et al. 2011). Accreditation standards for many health professional courses now demand evidence that IPL has been incorporated within curricula (e.g. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Accreditation Council 2012, Medical School Accreditation Committee 2012, Physiotherapy Board of Australia and Physiotherapy Board of New Zealand 2015). However, these demands are not easily...