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Key words
Collaborative practice, communication, interprofessional education, nursing student, patient outcomes, teamwork
Abstract
Background: Although teamwork and interprofessional collaboration are critical to patient safety, nursing, medical, and allied health graduates often feel ill-prepared to confidently communicate and collaborate with other team members. While interprofessional education (IPE) has been advocated as a way of addressing this issue, there are multiple barriers to its systematic and sustained integration in undergraduate healthcare programs. Despite these challenges, examples of effective IPE initiatives have emerged.
Innovation: This article profiles seven case studies of innovative interprofessional education activities that have been successfully implemented across five countries, for a variety of learners, using different delivery modalities, and with evaluation results attesting to their success.
Conclusions: The case studies demonstrate innovative ideas that have the potential to overcome some of the barriers to IPE through the use of creative and targeted approaches. This article provides a wealth of ideas for the successful design and implementation of IPE initiatives and will be of benefit to educators wishing to expand their repertoire of teaching approaches.
Clinical Relevance: A body of research attests to the relationship between interprofessional communication, teamwork, and patient outcomes. IPE is imperative for facilitating the development of nursing graduates' communication and teamwork skills; however, innovative approaches are needed to overcome the perceived and actual impediments to its implementation.
A wide body of research attests to the relationship between interprofessional communication, teamwork, and patient outcomes (Levett-Jones, Oates & MacDonaldWicks, 2014; Reeves, Pelone, Harrison, Goldman, & Zwarenstein, 2017). Yet, too often nursing, medical, and allied health graduates lack the confidence and skills needed to communicate and collaborate effectively as members of interprofessional teams (Gilligan, Outram & Levett-Jones, 2014). Interprofessional education (IPE) has been proposed as the most appropriate educational strategy for facilitating the development of these skills (Teodorczuk, Khoo, Morrissey, & Rogers, 2016). However, multiple barriers to the efficient, effective, sustained, and systematic integration of IPE in undergraduate education programs have been described (Lapkin, Levett-Jones, & Gilligan, 2012). Despite these challenges, examples of successful and innovative IPE initiatives have emerged.
The aim of this article is to profile seven case studies of creative IPE activities that have been successfully implemented across five countries. These case studies used both online and face-to-face teaching approaches...