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An interprofessional team of maternity care providers and academics developed a pilot interprofessional education (IPE) program in maternity care for undergraduate students in nursing, midwifery and medicine. There are few published studies examining IPE programs in maternity care, particularly at the undergraduate level, that examine long-term outcomes. This paper outlines findings from a case study that explored how participation in an IPE program in maternity care may enhance student knowledge, skills/attitudes, and may promote their collaborative behavior in the practice setting.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22828675

BACKGROUND:

Virtual worlds provide a promising means of delivering simulations for developing interprofessional health skills. However, developing and implementing a virtual world simulation is a challenging process, in part because of the novelty of virtual worlds as a simulation platform and also because of the degree of collaboration required among technical and subject experts. Thus, it can be difficult to ensure that the simulation is both technically satisfactory and educationally appropriate.

METHODS:

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18202993

The education of health professions students is rooted historically in time-honored and silo-bound traditions of pedagogy and content not easily influenced by outside forces. However, the quality chasm work of the Institute of Medicine, Institute of Healthcare Improvement, Quality and Safety Education for Nurses, and other groups has led to a remarkable willingness to change at one academic health sciences university. This article describes one university's strategies, challenges, and successes in delivering interprofessional educational programs.

Successful team care requires a shared understanding of roles and expertise. This paper describes the development and preliminary exploration of the psychometric properties of a tool designed to measure contributions to family practice medication-related processes. Our team identified medication-related processes commonly occurring in family practice. We assessed clinical appropriateness using a sensibility questionnaire and pilot-tested with 11 pharmacists, nurses and physicians.

The 'Professionals in Rural Practice' course was developed with the aim of preparing students enrolled in professional programs in Canada to become better equipped for the possible eventuality of professional work in a rural setting. To match the reality of living and working in a rural community, which by nature is interprofessional, the course designers were an interprofessional teaching team.

Pre-registration nursing programmes have been criticized for not adequately preparing nurses to work with children and young people with mental health issues. This article highlights the importance of developing strategies across traditional branch boundaries to remedy this curricula deficit. In 2007, the School of Health Science at Swansea University began an interprofessional initiative between mental health and child branches and designed a 2-day child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) workshop in collaboration with a local specialist CAMHS nurse.

Research is often scholarship driven and the findings are then channelled into the practice community on the assumption that it is utilising an evidence-based approach in its service delivery. Because of persisting difficulties in bridging the practice-evidence gap in health care, there has been a call for more active links between researchers and practitioners. The authors were part of an interprofessional research initiative which originated from within an acute stroke clinical community.

Almost all information about interprofessional education (IPE) comes from a few western countries; little from the rest of the world. This paper helps to rectify that omission. It reports the first phase of a study of "shared learning" between health professions in "medical sciences education" in the Islamic Republic of Iran based on a documentary search and national survey of all government affiliated medical sciences universities (MSUs) with examples which meet some of the criteria for IPE.