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The Collaboration for Maternal and Newborn Health, a multidisciplinary group of maternity care providers from the University of British Columbia (UBC), received funding from Health Canada to develop interprofessional education programs for health care students. Medical, midwifery, and nursing students from UBC were invited to participate in the three programs described in this article. The Interprofessional Student Doula Support Program, a year-long program for 15 students, combines classroom learning about marginalized women with on-call doula support to attend births.

A recent national assessment of emergency planning in Canada suggests that health care professionals are not properly prepared for disasters. In response to this gap, an interprofessional course in disaster management was developed, implemented and evaluated in Toronto, Canada from 2007 to 2008. Undergraduate students from five educational institutions in nursing, medicine, paramedicine, police, media and health administration programs took an eight-week online course.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19842961

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19412860

BACKGROUND: Many measurement scales for interprofessional collaboration are developed for one health professional group, typically nurses. Evaluating interprofessional collaborative relationships can benefit from employing a measurement scale suitable for multiple health provider groups, including physicians and other health professionals. To this end, the paper begins development of a new interprofessional collaboration measurement scale designed for use with nurses, physicians, and other professionals practicing in contemporary acute care settings.

INTRODUCTION:

Interprofessional education (IPE) is interactive and constructivist in nature and requires specific facilitation skills to engage participants in a unique body of content, interpersonal interaction, and learning from each other. This article describes the development and testing of a scale, the Interprofessional Facilitation Scale (IPFS), to assess educators' skills in facilitating IPE.

METHODS:

CONTEXT:

High-fidelity simulation in health professional programs helps educators and students meet the challenges of increasingly complex clinical practice settings. Simulation has been used primarily to train nursing students either in interprofessional teams or within their respective nursing training levels. However, students' experiences of learning alongside others in different levels or years of the nursing program have not been explored.

Respect is important in the creation of a positive perioperative work environment and effective OR teams. Low scores for respect in the OR on an employee opinion survey and responses on a more customized survey that examined issues associated with respect prompted leaders at the University Health Network to undertake a multiyear organizational strategy to address respect and quality of worklife initiatives. An interprofessional quality of worklife task force convened to create an action plan to address the outcomes of the surveys.