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In response to the Institute of Medicine challenge to improve patient safety and quality of care, an office directing patient safety/quality of care at an academic medical center and faculty from health professions schools collaborated on design, delivery, and evaluation of an interprofessional student curriculum on patient safety, quality, and teamwork. Annually for 6 years, second-year medical students, senior baccalaureate nursing students, second-year masters in health administration students, and junior baccalaureate respiratory therapy students participated.

There is a widening gap between the health care needs of older persons and the treatment skills of the health care professionals who serve them. This gap is especially severe in rural areas, where there is a shortage of and inadequate collaboration between health care professionals and poor access to services for older persons.

BACKGROUND:

Interprofessional education (IPE), where two or more professions learn with, from, and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care, has been proposed as a curriculum strategy to promote mutual understanding between professions, thus helping to prepare health professionals to work in challenging contemporary health systems. Although there is support for IPE initiatives within health professional education, differences in student motivation and learning strategies are likely to contribute to the success of these initiatives.

OBJECTIVE:

STUDY DESIGN:

Questionnaire survey.

OBJECTIVE:

To elicit orthopedic surgeons' attitudes toward chiropractic.

SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA:

Orthopedic surgeons and chiropractors often attend to similar patient populations, but little is known about the attitudes of orthopedic surgeons toward chiropractic.

METHODS:

BACKGROUND: Patient-focused care provided by an interprofessional team has long been presented as the preferred method of primary care delivery. Community pharmacists should and can provide leadership for many clinical and managerial activities within the primary care team.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the extent to which community pharmacists are prepared to be members of the health care team, and to assess their support for general expansion of clinical responsibilities.

With the growing interest in interprofessional education and practice, methods to evaluate the effectiveness of related curricular activities are essential. The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to assess the attitudes of students in medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, and physical therapy toward interprofessional education using the Interdisciplinary Education Perception Scale and Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale and (2) to compare data with normative data previously reported.

Effective interprofessional collaboration is an important factor in addressing health care needs and priorities. Educators and health care practitioners have argued that interprofessional education (IPE) is necessary to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors to work collaboratively and ultimately deliver enhanced patient/client care. The University of Toronto has implemented an introductory IPE session for approximately 1000 health science students that focuses on teamwork.

This study describes the redesign of an interprofessional team development course for health science students. A theoretical model is hypothesized as a framework for the redesign process, consisting of two themes: 1) the increasing trend among post-secondary students to participate in social networking (e.g., Facebook, Second Life) and 2) the need for healthcare educators to provide interprofessional training that results in effective communities of practice and better patient care.

There has been limited research on the effect of interprofessional education (IPE) over time on the attitudes of undergraduate health and human service professional students. Previous research in this area has suggested that students from different professions report differing attitudes towards IPE and interprofessional teamwork, and such attitudes may also be influenced by other background characteristics of the students themselves (e.g., gender, age).

The aim of this study was to investigate differences in attitudes towards collaboration between doctors and nurses among medical students in two medical schools: Gothenburg University (GU), which did not offer interprofessional education, and Linköping University (LiU), with a curriculum containing an interprofessional education programme; between male and female students; and between those with previous working experience in medical care and those without.