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

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.

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.

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to generate a theory of the interprofessional collaborative learning process of occupational therapy (OT) students who were engaged in a collaborative learning experience with students from other allied health disciplines. Data consisted of semi-structured interviews with nine OT students from four different interprofessional collaborative learning experiences at three universities.

BACKGROUND:

Effective physician-nurse collaboration is an important, but incompletely understood determinant of patient and nurse satisfaction, and patient safety. Its impact on physicians has not been described. This study was undertaken to develop a fuller understanding of the collaboration experience and its outcomes.

METHODS:

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

Internationally, there are a number of universities at which medical and dental education programmes share common elements. There are no studies about the experiences of medical and dental students enrolled in different programmes who share significant amounts of learning and teaching.

METHODS:

PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19085202

This report demonstrates the application of a competency model to the regulated and unregulated professions of medical radiation technology, social work, pharmacy, and psychology. The competency model is based on the CanMEDS framework and was originally applied to the professions of medicine, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and nursing in an earlier work. The framework identifies the core competencies common to learners in health care, which are professional (and health advocate), expert, scholar, manager, communicator, and collaborator.