Teaching Collaboration: A Retrospective Look at Incorporating Teamwork into an Interprofessional Curriculum

At the Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences, an interprofessional education (IPE) curriculum has been integrated into all health professional programs. A significant component of the introductory course in this IPE curriculum is on teamwork.

Our aim is to share the experiential strategies that we integrated into our didactic curriculum to demonstrate the importance of teams and their value to the future collaboration in clinical practice for our students.

Six of the facilitators participated in a retrospective collaborative inquiry to identify emerging themes from the reflections of the students after the utilization of two experiential exercises that displayed characteristic(s) of effective teams and ineffective teams in the team component of the curriculum. The data that anchored this discussion were a performance assessment task (PAT) submitted by each student team with reflections on two of the team experiential activities "Mist Ridge" and "Saboteur". Facilitators used the reflective component of this PAT to identify emerging common themes.

Experiential activities were pivotal in conveying the real life application of teamwork and the respective benefits and pitfalls associated with an effective and a dysfunctional team. Key elements such as "being valued," trust, power, hierarchy, responsibility, interpersonal skills, respect, problem-solving, and open communication were discussed. The three emergent themes from the student reflections were types of communication, team member's characteristics, and the importance of team process.

Teaching the collaborative skills of communication and team building are essential to effective collaboration within interprofessional health care teams. The skills that the students have acquired through targeted experiential exercises have provided them with the knowledge, skills, behaviour, and attitudes to be confident in a more collaborative approach to their clinical practice.