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AIM:

This paper is a report of a study to examine nursing emotion work and interprofessional collaboration in order to understand and improve collaborative nursing practice.

BACKGROUND:

The emergency department (ED) education team at the Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham, has developed a process to promote effective teamwork in major trauma management. To introduce this process to ED staff, the team developed a multiprofessional education and training programme. This article describes the development process, explains how and why it was undertaken, and provides details of the education and training programme. It also highlights the challenges met by the education team during implementation.

The ability to work with professionals from other disciplines to deliver collaborative, patient-centred care is considered a critical element of professional practice requiring a specific set of competencies. However, a generally accepted framework for collaborative competencies is missing, which makes consistent preparation of students and staff challenging. Some authors have argued that there is a lack of conceptual clarity of the "active ingredients" of collaboration relating to quality of care and patient outcomes, which may be at the root of the competencies issue.

There is limited research on how health professionals are currently socialized to work interprofessionally. As part of a large-scale initiative funded by Health Canada, this report adds to our understanding of socialization and how it can prepare the health care student for an interprofessional health care environment. Data were collected through semistructured individual and group interviews with 83 respondents (i.e., faculty, students, health care and academic administrators, and health care providers) at seven clinical sites and five academic institutions throughout Alberta.

CONTEXT: The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for supporting interprofessional communication is becoming increasingly common in health care. However, little research has explored how ICTs affect interprofessional communication, or how novices are trained to be effective interprofessional ICT users. This study explores the interprofessional communication strategies of nurses and doctors (trainees and experts) when their communications were mediated by a specific ICT: an electronic patient record (EPR).

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19995269

BACKGROUND: Asynchronous e-learning is an appealing option for interprofessional education (IPE) as it addresses the geographic and timetabling barriers often encountered when organizing activities across educational programs.

AIM: This study examined the extent to which pre-licensure students were able to learn with, from, and about each other through completion of innovative online IPE learning modules.

With longer survival, individuals living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection are facing a multitude of health-related challenges due to HIV, its associated concurrent health conditions, and treatments. Despite the need for rehabilitation, few rehabilitation professionals work with people living with HIV, with many feeling they lack adequate knowledge and skills to assess and treat this population.

Interprofessional (IP) collaboration is recognized as critical for patient-centred care. The clinical setting is an ideal environment for students to learn the competencies required to effectively work with providers from other professions. To enhance traditional clinical placements, we propose an IP mentoring approach, defined as learning that takes place between providers and students who are from different disciplines or health professions. In IP mentoring, students have primary relationships with their preceptors, but also have interactions with providers from other professions.

CONTEXT:

Interprofessional education of pre-licensure students is viewed as an important precursor to developing healthcare professionals who are able to work collaboratively.

OBJECTIVES:

This study conducted a program evaluation of an innovative interprofessional communication skills initiative which incorporated problem-based learning, cooperative learning and standardized patients.

METHODS: