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In this article, I explore what happens when specialist palliative care staff meet together to discuss patients under their care. Many studies (e.g., Atkinson) have discussed how health care practitioners in various settings use rhetorical strategies when presenting cases in situations such as ward rounds and team meetings. Strategies for arguing and persuading are central to medical practice in the interprofessional context.

AIM:

To examine the work and perceived impact of a dedicated specialist care homes support team.

METHOD:

A constructivist methodology was adopted. Data were collected in the form of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with staff, telephone interviews with managers, observation of meetings and teaching sessions, and analysis of documents.

FINDINGS:

CONTEXT: The growing emphasis on teamwork within the National Health Service (NHS) has made it a priority to understand how health care teams learn together and cope with change.

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to explore how collective learning and change happen in primary care teams and how the process varies across the disciplines of general medical practice, pharmacy and dentistry.

METHODS: This study reports on qualitative data gathered from 10 primary care teams over 1 year, by means of observational visits and 38 semi-structured interviews.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18989811

This study investigates the experiences of staff and students involved in an identified Common Learning unit (module) named "Preparation for Practice". The unit was studied by those undertaking pre-registration undergraduate pathways in Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Diagnostic Radiography and Therapeutic Radiography at London South Bank University. The study comprised uni-professional, inter-professional and staff focus groups.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19248326

Interprofessional learning is seen as increasingly important for all health and social care workers. How this is integrated into the education of these workers is less clear and more of a challenge. This article describes an online learning activity used to facilitate interprofessional learning in a Faculty of Health and Social Care in the UK. An online conference was used to bring students together, utilising a real life case scenario based around a family within a virtual town. Students from a variety of programmes and professional groups participated in an asynchronous discussion forum.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20602594

This paper describes the articulation of a model of interprofessional mentorship derived from qualitative interviews with students and health and social care professionals who support students in practice settings. The findings describe three core components within the data: the facilitation of interprofessional learning; supervision of students and assessment of their learning. These components interact with the aim of developing interprofessional capability in students.

E-learning is seen as offering possible solutions to the barriers of large scale interprofessional education. This paper discusses a study that explored the underlying pedagogical thinking employed by lecturers when planning e-learning materials for interprofessional education. The themes uncovered in the data were: "reflective spaces for creativity"; "from logistics to learner autonomy"; "authentic"; "constructivist approaches"; "inter-active learning to promote collaboration" and "bringing the patient/service user into the classroom".