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

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES:

The communication of patient prognosis is an essential component of modern healthcare. Previous research has focussed on clinician-to-patient communication only, while the interaction between different professionals in a clinical setting remains relatively unexplored. The research reported here investigated how multidisciplinary clinicians (nursing, medicine and allied health) communicated prognosis information in these professional groups in an acute care setting.

METHODS:

An educational visit was made by a group of students representing all eight professional pathways on an interprofessional learning programme in health and social care at Canterbury Christ Church University to a hospital in Kerala, India. Interprofessional clinical supervision groups were organised in order to support the students, many of whom had little experience of foreign travel, in an environment they were anticipated to find emotionally challenging.

OBJECTIVE:

To assess the feasibility of recruitment and standardize care delivery for an interprofessional program for inflammatory arthritis education (Prescription for Education, or RxEd), and to explore outcomes relevant to arthritis patient education.

METHODS:

This paper reports on undergraduate students' evaluation of a new hospice-based interprofessional practice placement (IPP) that took place in the voluntary sector from 2008 to 2009. Ward-based interprofessional training has been successfully demonstrated in a range of clinical environments. However, the multidisciplinary setting within a hospice in-patient unit offered a new opportunity for interprofessional learning.

PURPOSE:

Physician assistant (PA) students need exposure to a wide range of clinical settings including long-term care (LTC); however, finding consistent educational LTC opportunities is difficult. This article describes a unique, replicable, educational opportunity for PA students to get exposure to the LTC setting by working with a consultant pharmacist.

METHODS:

Pairs of students spent 4 hours with the pharmacist, reviewing and copresenting two to three patient charts. Students completed a questionnaire that asked them to describe what they had learned.

Teamwork, collaboration and interprofessional care are becoming the new standard in health care, and service delivery in work practice is no exception. Most rehabilitation professionals believe that they intuitively know how to work collaboratively with others such as workers, employers, insurers and other professionals. However, little information is available that can assist rehabilitation professionals in enacting authentic transdisciplinary approaches in work practice contexts.

Primary health care is undergoing significant organizational change, including the development of interdisciplinary health care teams. Understanding how teams function effectively in primary care will assist training programs in teaching effective interprofessional practices. This study aimed to explore the views of members of primary health care teams regarding what constitutes a team, team effectiveness and the factors that affect team effectiveness in primary care.

We studied the workings of a rehabilitation team in a videoconference setting to note the pros and cons of videoconferencing in the development of interprofessional care plans (ICPs). We recorded every videoconference held by the teams of the specialized centre and the regional centre for clients with traumatic brain injuries over an 18-month period. Thirteen recorded videoconferences, lasting for 30-98 min, were analysed through an observation grid.

On entering higher education students become professionally socialized, and parallel with this, stereotyping takes place, students developing a more positive assessment of their own roles than those of other professions. This difference between the view of their own and other professions can contribute to creating cognitive and social boundaries between professions that hinder sharing of knowledge, which can result in poor cooperation.