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OBJECTIVE:

To assess whether structured team briefings improve operating room communication. Design, Setting, and

PARTICIPANTS:

This 13-month prospective study used a preintervention/postintervention design. All staff and trainees in the division of general surgery at a Canadian academic tertiary care hospital were invited to participate. Participants included 11 general surgeons, 24 surgical trainees, 41 operating room nurses, 28 anesthesiologists, and 24 anesthesia trainees.

INTERVENTION:

The Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia (IRPBC) was established in 2003 as a pilot program aimed at supporting the recruitment of health and human service professionals to rural communities in British Columbia, Canada. The program was designed to expose students in the health and human service professions to rural communities and to assess whether this exposure increased the likelihood of their return to work in nonurban settings once they completed their studies.

Medical and nursing students organized a contextual interprofessional learning experience involving observation of surgical safety practices according to the parameters of the World Health Organization (WHO) surgical safety checklist. Students were oriented to patient safety principles, operating room (OR) protocol, and the WHO surgical safety checklist. One hundred thirty students participated in interprofessional OR visitations.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18800284

Interprofessional collaboration is vital to the delivery of quality care in long-term care settings; however, caregivers in long-term care face barriers to participating in training programs to improve collaborative practices. Consequently, eLearning can be used to create an environment that combines convenient, individual learning with collaborative experiential learning. Findings of this study revealed that learners enjoyed the flexibility of the Working Together learning resource.

This research was part of a Health Canada funded initiative developed to provide evidence about the effectiveness of interprofessional education (IPE) interventions to promote collaborative patient-centred care. Health professional students' ratings of health professions and the effect of IPE on those ratings were examined. Participants were divided into three groups (N=51); control, education, and practice site immersion.

PURPOSE:

This study evaluated the impact of an educational intervention that integrates concepts of a community re-engagement framework (CR) and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) on health care providers' (HCP) practice with persons living with stroke (PLS).

METHOD:

PROBLEM ADDRESSED: A number of agencies that accredit university health sciences programs recently added standards for the acquisition of knowledge and skills with respect to interprofessional collaboration. Within primary care settings there are no practical training programs that allow students from different disciplines to develop competencies in this area.

Interprofessional simulation interventions, especially when face-to-face, involve considerable resources and require that all participants convene in a single location at a specific time. Scheduling multiple people across different programs is an important barrier to implementing interprofessional education interventions. This study explored a novel way to overcome the challenges associated with scheduling interprofessional learning experiences through the use of simulations in a virtual environment (Web.Alive™) where learners interact as avatars.