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BACKGROUND:

In 1972 Norwegian health and educational authorities emphasized the importance of interprofessional collaboration in health care and the need to prepare students to work across boundaries. In 1995 the Norwegian government recommended a common core in curricula for undergraduate health and social educational programmes in all university colleges throughout the country in the belief that this would improve collaborative practice and deliver more effective and efficient health care.

BACKGROUND:

Interprofessional competence can be defined as knowledge and understanding of their own and the other team members' professional roles, comprehension of communication and teamwork and collaboration in taking care of patients.

AIM:

To evaluate whether students perceived that they had achieved interprofessional competence after participating in clinical teamwork training.

METHOD:

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.

Professionals bring their own personal and professional culture, competence, and interaction styles to the work setting. This study explores how undergraduate students (n = 619) at five different professional qualification programs from two Norwegian university colleges perceived interprofession education and collaboration (interprofessionalism). The student groups were drawn from nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, biomedical laboratory science, and radiography.

BACKGROUND: Health care professionals are supposed to work in teams. Students in health care need to learn how to collaborate during their undergraduate education. Interprofessional learning environments, where collaboration is necessary, may be differently accepted by students depending on their approach to learning.

AIM: We investigated health care students' evaluations of interprofessional clinical training in relation to their study orientations.

SETTING:

An orthopaedic interprofessional training ward manned by students at a University Hospital.

OBJECTIVE:

To assess to what extent students from different undergraduate programmes evaluated the effects of a 2-week rotation at the ward on their professional roles and the value of teamwork within health care.

METHOD:

The purpose of this study was to compare which learning outcomes relating to an Interprofessional Training Unit (ITU) experience were found to be most important by students and by alumni. A cohort of 428 students in the ITU was asked to write three short statements describing the most important learning outcomes from the ITU. Alumni from the same cohort were after graduation asked the same question. Furthermore, they were asked to fill out a 12-item questionnaire. The statements concerning learning outcome were analysed qualitatively and categorized.

This paper explores the relationship between time allocation on formal and informal forms of contact within interprofessional teams and an interdependent collaboration. Data were collected by a questionnaire including items on work organization, team climate and time allocation that was responded to by 226 professionals from 44 interprofessional teams. An additional sample of 139 professionals from 18 teams responded to the same questionnaire except for the item on time allocation. The teams worked within occupational health care, psychiatry, rehabilitation and school health care.

Interprofessional education (IPE) for teams of undergraduate students has since 1999 been carried out at the orthopedic emergency department at the Karolinska University Hospital. During a 2-week period, teams of medical, nursing and physiotherapy students practice together. With the aim of training professional and collaboration skills, the teams take care of patients with varying acute complaints, under the guidance of supervisors from each profession.