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To elicit nurses' opinions on five proposed models of maternity care in Ontario, to examine barriers to collaborative practice, and to identify factors that would encourage nurses to practise in the area of intrapartum care, a survey was mailed to a stratified random sample of nurses in Ontario (N = 750). Participants were asked whether they would consider practising in one or more of the five proposed models of maternity care. Almost half the participants endorsed the model of nurses' providing labour and delivery care to patients of family physicians and obstetricians.

AIM: This paper is a report of preliminary evaluations of an interprofessional education through simulation project by focusing on learner and teacher reactions to the pilot modules.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19242853

There are few sustained interprofessional learning opportunities in practice which engage the whole cohort of health and social care students across a region, the Leicester Model of Interprofessional Education is such an example. Since 1995 the Leicester Model has evolved to enable health and social care students to learn about the complexities of delivering multi-agency care in a range of health and social care settings. The learning environment is situated at the front line of service delivery.

BACKGROUND: There is a need for tools by which to evaluate the beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes that underlie interprofessional socialization and collaborative practice in health care settings.

Work-integrated learning is essential to health professional education, but faces increasing academic and industry resource pressures. The aim of this pilot "Professional Practice Project" was to develop and implement an innovative education intervention for clinical educators across several health disciplines. The project used interprofessional collaboration as its underlying philosophy, and a participatory action research methodology in four cycles: Cycle 1: Formation of an interprofessional project executive and working party from academic staff.

INTRODUCTION:

Interprofessional collaborative practices are increasingly recognized as an effective way to deal with complex health problems. However, health sciences students continue to be trained in specialized programs and have little occasion for learning in interdisciplinary contexts.

PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT:

Effective interprofessional education engages participants in authentic tasks, settings and roles. Using these guiding principles, an interprofessional standardized patient exercise (ISPE) was developed and implemented for 101 dental, medical, nurse practitioner, pharmacy and physical therapy students. This study describes the ISPE and evaluates its impact on students' attitudes toward working in interprofessional teams. The attitudes toward health care teams (ATHCT) survey was administered pre- and post-ISPE and to a sample of non-participating students.

A need exists for measures to evaluate the impact of interprofessional education (IPE) interventions. We undertook development and evaluation of a scale to measure self-efficacy perceptions of pre-licensure students in medicine, dentistry and health professions. The scale was developed in the context of a project entitled, "Seamless Care: An Experiential Model of Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centered Practice".

INTRODUCTION: