Interprofessional education in pediatrics-Child protection and family services as a teaching example

Interprofessional collaboration between different professional groups in the health care system is essential to efficient and effective patient care. Especially in pediatrics, in the field of child protection, and family services it is mandatory to involve experts from different health-care professions to optimize support for children and their families. Interprofessional education in medical schools and specifically in pediatrics is rare in Germany, but is called for by the German National Competence Based Catalogue of Learning Objectives for Undergraduate Medical Education (NKLM). We developed an interprofessional course aimed at bringing medical students together with students of psychology, social work, clinical education, and educational science to learn from, about and with each other in the context of child protection and family services. This offers opportunities for all participants to understand profession-specific competencies, roles, attitudes, and limits of their professional roles. The course is led by an interprofessional teaching tandem (social scientist & physician); further input is provided by other health and social care professionals. After the students get a brief overview about the requirements for a successful interprofessional cooperation they solve case studies in interprofessional teams with online support by the teaching tandem. We assess the feasibility and acceptability of this interprofessional course and describe challenges encountered when conducting this kind of learning concept for health care professions. All conducted courses over five consecutive terms were evaluated with an arithmetic mean of AM=1.32 on a 6-point scale (1="excellent", 6="insufficient"), the teaching tandem was evaluated with AM=1.1. All participants (N=85 complete evaluations) voted for the course to be continued in the following terms. Especially the opportunity to discuss cases with students from different degree programs was highly valued as were interprofessional discussions and more in-depth understanding of other professions' competencies and roles.