AIM:

This paper is a report of a study to examine nursing emotion work and interprofessional collaboration in order to understand and improve collaborative nursing practice.

BACKGROUND:

The emergency department (ED) education team at the Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham, has developed a process to promote effective teamwork in major trauma management. To introduce this process to ED staff, the team developed a multiprofessional education and training programme. This article describes the development process, explains how and why it was undertaken, and provides details of the education and training programme. It also highlights the challenges met by the education team during implementation.

How Allied Health Professional (AHP) students and educational providers within England are redefining professionalism is the focus of this small scale case study. A single case study design was used to explore how AHP students viewed how they had learnt to be professional.

The ability to work with professionals from other disciplines to deliver collaborative, patient-centred care is considered a critical element of professional practice requiring a specific set of competencies. However, a generally accepted framework for collaborative competencies is missing, which makes consistent preparation of students and staff challenging. Some authors have argued that there is a lack of conceptual clarity of the "active ingredients" of collaboration relating to quality of care and patient outcomes, which may be at the root of the competencies issue.

Interprofessional education (IPE) in health and social care undergraduate education is a key governmental driver [DOH, 2001. Working Together, Learning Together. A Framework for Lifelong Learning in the NHS. HMSO, London]. In the UK, IPE has been advocated and developed as a means to encourage effective collaboration in order to improve public sector services [Barr, H., Ross, F., 2006. Mainstreaming interprofessional education in the United Kingdom: a position paper. Journal of Interprofessional Care 20 (2), 96-104].

There is limited research on how health professionals are currently socialized to work interprofessionally. As part of a large-scale initiative funded by Health Canada, this report adds to our understanding of socialization and how it can prepare the health care student for an interprofessional health care environment. Data were collected through semistructured individual and group interviews with 83 respondents (i.e., faculty, students, health care and academic administrators, and health care providers) at seven clinical sites and five academic institutions throughout Alberta.

CONTEXT: The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for supporting interprofessional communication is becoming increasingly common in health care. However, little research has explored how ICTs affect interprofessional communication, or how novices are trained to be effective interprofessional ICT users. This study explores the interprofessional communication strategies of nurses and doctors (trainees and experts) when their communications were mediated by a specific ICT: an electronic patient record (EPR).

PURPOSE: This article presents a descriptive research study that investigated the issues discussed in rehabilitation case conferences, with specific reference to patients with acquired communication disabilities of neurological origin.

Learning in clinical education can be understood as a process of becoming a legitimate participant in the relevant context. Interprofessional training wards (IPTWs) are designed to give students from educational programmes in health and social care a realistic experience of collaboration for the purpose of developing teamwork skills. IPTWs have been found to be appreciated by the students and to influence students' understanding of each other's professions.

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19995269