Collaboration During Crisis: New Graduates' Experiences of Interprofessional Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic presented unprecedented challenges for health and social care practice worldwide. Ensuring effective collaboration between health and social care is essential to meet population health needs- especially during crisis. Interprofessional education for collaborative practice (IPECP) during students' pre-licensure education is an important primer for collaboration in practice. Within IPECP, students are provided opportunities to learn about, with, and from each other, lending to professional and interprofessional socialization and processes of developing an interprofessional identity. Few studies have followed health professions graduates longitudinally from pre-licensure into professional practice to understand how IPECP supports new professionals' readiness for collaborative practice. The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with the timing of this longitudinal study of students' experiences of IPECP and collaboration upon entry to practice. This interpretive, narrative analysis provides novel insights to how collaboration was experienced during the pandemic and implications for interprofessional identity development. The participant narratives provide insight into the contexts, settings, and experiences that were critical catalysts for connection and collaboration between professionals. Findings support a need for IPECP throughout pre-licensure and into practice and provides important direction for innovative curricula, policy and practice development to prepare future collaborative practitioners and interprofessional teams.