Patient Partnerships in Health Professional Education: Insights from a Qualitative Synthesis

Patients have long been involved in health professional education in placement and fieldwork contexts. However, such contexts have been oriented to learning about rather than with patients. Increasing patient involvement in future health professionals' education has been an area of growing scholarly interest in recent decades. Due to the variation in patient involvement across contexts, most literature reviews on this subject have taken a broad conceptual approach. However, with the shift toward more participatory approaches in healthcare generally, we were interested in how patient partnership specifically was represented in health professional education. Our review aims to support educators seeking to enhance health professional education and patient care by critically examining the evolving and varied understandings of patient partnership in health professional education. Using a qualitative synthesis approach, we conducted a comprehensive search of five databases, selecting a final sample of 71 articles. We identified five overarching themes: 1. Rationales for patient partnership reflect a spectrum from transformative commitments to policy drivers; 2. Diverse theoretical and conceptual imaginings of patient partnership; 3. Enacting patient partnership: Effort, time, emotional labor, ethics, and outcomes; 4. Impactful patient partnerships demand that patients and carers are seen by students and educators as people to learn from and with; and 5. Sustainable and inclusive patient partnerships require relational and structural support. We discuss the aspects of health professional education where patient partnership is most meaningful. We recommend investing time, support, and resources to enable the creation of long-term partnerships that emphasize relational processes where shared understandings and diverse perspectives are nurtured. We also advocate for more curriculum flexibility and critical perspectives to push the boundaries of patient partnership in health professional education. An area for further research is evaluating the impact of long-term patient partnerships, including those sustained beyond graduation, as students move into their professional roles.