A passage to interprofessional learning: the benefits to students from an educational visit to India

An educational visit was made by a group of students representing all eight professional pathways on an interprofessional learning programme in health and social care at Canterbury Christ Church University to a hospital in Kerala, India. Interprofessional clinical supervision groups were organised in order to support the students, many of whom had little experience of foreign travel, in an environment they were anticipated to find emotionally challenging. At the close of the visit, following informal observation of a degree of interprofessional learning that had not been anticipated, qualitative data were collected by means of an opportunistically administered questionnaire that yielded insights into the quality of the learning--cultural, interprofessional and personal--that had resulted. This data indicated multiple benefits, some quite unexpected, for all involved; the aim of this paper is to present and discuss these. There are significant implications for health and social care education, including the value of international visits and interprofessional clinical supervision.