Connecting knowledge: First-year health care students' learning in early interprofessional tutorials

Area of Science:

• Health Professions Education
• Interprofessional Learning
• Collaborative Healthcare

Background:

• Effective collaboration is crucial in healthcare.
• Interprofessional education (IPE) aims to enhance student collaboration.
• Curriculum integration and competency development in IPE require further research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine how undergraduate students develop interprofessional competencies within problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials.
• To investigate the role of professional scenarios and tutors in early-stage IPE.

Main Methods:

• Video-recorded PBL tutorials involving first-year undergraduate students from medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology, and physiotherapy.
• Analysis focused on student discussions of professional literature within the tutorials.
• Theoretical framework: Communities of Practice.

Main Results:

• Students actively discussed and integrated professional knowledge.
• "Brokers" (tutors) and "boundary objects" (scenarios) facilitated the development of professional knowledge.
• Scenarios also empowered students to act as "brokers" themselves, fostering peer learning.

Conclusions:

• IPE, particularly PBL with contextualized scenarios, can be effectively implemented in the early stages of undergraduate health professions programs.
• This approach supports the development of interprofessional competencies.
• Findings offer evidence for integrating IPE early in health professions curricula.