Developing Inter-Professional Education Initiatives to Aid Working and Learning Between Veterinarians and Veterinary...

The veterinary workplace consists of different professionals working together in inter-professional teams. Previous work has explored the benefits of effective veterinary teamwork for multiple stakeholders. In this teaching tip article, we outline the underlying educational theories and tips for developing inter-professional teaching to foster students' appreciation of the different roles and responsibilities of veterinarians and veterinary nurses/vet techs. Inter-professional education (IPE) requires students to learn with, about, and from each other and implies recognition of social learning as an underpinning approach. It involves developing learning opportunities to address students' potential misunderstandings of each other's motivations, to allow them to explore issues present in the other profession's practice, and to clarify sometimes overlapping roles and responsibilities. Students are given opportunities to explore the complexity of inter-professional teamwork in a safe environment using real-life topics as context for their collaboration. Two veterinary examples of IPE at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) are provided to explore different teaching methods and topics that have proved successful in our context: dentistry and directed learning scenarios. We describe how RVC has developed an IPE team consisting of faculty members who champion IPE, which has, in turn, inspired students to create a student-led IPE club, hosting extracurricular educational events. This is an example of an effective student-teacher partnership. A number of challenges exist in embedding IPE, but the benefits it offers in integrating clinical and professional elements of the curricula make it worthy of consideration.