A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

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Teaching in the disciplines
member must understand their own role and its boundaries, and seek to understand the
contribution of other team members. Appropriate skills and attitudes could be developed
within learning experiences confined to one profession, but multidisciplinary and
interprofessional learning are often seen as key to enhancing collaborative practice (DoH,
2001; GMC, 2003; NMC, 2004a).
Implementing interprofessional learning within pre-registration education is
challenging: coping with large numbers of students, differing programme lengths and
academic levels, timetable and other resource constraints, meeting the requirements of
professional bodies, overcoming geographical dispersion of related disciplines across
universities. Nevertheless, enthusiasts regularly pioneer shared learning initiatives. Many
examples may be found in Barr et al. (2000, 2005), Freeth et al. (2005) and Glen and Leiba
(2002).
While many interprofessional education initiatives have been classroom or skills centre
based, others seize opportunities for shared learning within practice placements. After
all, this is where interprofessional collaboration matters most. The task is to coordinate
the activities of students from various professions that are placed within the same
environment. Facilitation for learning with and from each other should be provided. Case
study 2 outlines a ‘total immersion’ approach to this in which supervised interprofessional
student teams are given responsibility for a small caseload. This is a powerful learning
experience but requires high levels of commitment, enthusiasm and supervision from
the selected clinical area. Not all areas can offer this, so less intensive models are needed
too. For example, student teams may be asked to ‘shadow’ real teams and plan care based
on information drawn from talking to the patient/client and perhaps relatives, also
drawing information from observing the multidisciplinary team at work in the relevant
clinical area(s). The students’ joint care plan can be evaluated by the university or clinical
staff and it may be possible for service users to add to the evaluative discussion. In due
course the students’ plan can be compared with the actual course of events as recorded
in notes or summarised at multidisciplinary team meetings. Barber et al. (1997) describe
an approach like this in a ‘teaching nursing home’ in the USA.
Case study 2: Training wards and similar environments
Clinical training wards have been developed in Sweden and Britain (Wahlstrõm
and Sandén, 1998; Freeth et al., 2001; Ponzer et al., 2004). Orthopaedic wards tend
to be chosen since these patients predictably require regular input from nursing,
medicine, physiotherapy and occupational therapy, with opportunities for
contact with other professions too. For much of their stay patients will not be
acutely unwell, offering scope for student teams to learn how to manage and
progress care. Normally student teams work shifts under the watchful eye of a
senior nurse who works alongside them. Facilitators from each profession visit
regularly to support the student team. Every two or three days the student team