Anne Croker

When students from different professions are co-located: the importance of interprofessional rapport for learning to work together

Abstract With increasing interest and research into interprofessional learning, there is scope to more deeply understand what happens when students from different professions live and study in the same location. This study aimed to explore the issue of co-location and its effects on how students learn to work with other professions. The setting for this study was a rural health education facility in Australia with close links to local health care and community services. Philosophical hermeneutics informed the research method. Interviews were undertaken with 29 participants, including students, academic educators and clinical supervisors in diagnostic radiography, medicine, nursing, nutrition and dietetics, pharmacy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech pathology. Photo-elicitation was used to facilitate participant engagement with the topic. The findings foreground the value of interprofessional rapport building opportunities for students learning to work together. Enabled by the proximity of different professions in shared educational, clinical and social spaces, interprofessional rapport building was contingent on contextual conditions (balance of professions, shared spaces and adequate time) and individuals interpersonal capabilities (being interested, being inclusive, developing interpersonal bonds, giving and receiving respect, bringing a sense of own profession and being patient-centred). In the absence of these conditions and capabilities, negative professional stereotypes may be inadvertently re-enforced. From these findings suggestions are made for nurturing interprofessional rapport building opportunities to enable students of different professions to learn to work together.

What Do We Mean by 'Collaboration' and When Is a 'Team' Not a 'Team'?: A Qualitative Unbundling of Terms and Meanings

‘Collaboration’ and ‘team’ are terms commonly used in literature related to the provision of health care, including rehabilitation. However, the complexity of the phenomena represented by these terms is often overlooked. ‘Collaboration’ is rarely defined, and ‘teams’ are often presented as easily identifiable and stable entities. Simplistic use of these terms often results in different aspects of interprofessional practice being researched and discussed without reference to the ‘messiness’ (the ambiguities and complexities) surrounding professional practice. As a consequence, health professionals may have difficulties in understanding the relevance of such research to their particular situations. This paper explores the complexities of the phenomenon of collaboration and the concept of team, with the aim of highlighting the benefits of researchers embracing rather than simplifying these phenomena. The paper reports on emerging models in action, which is one part of a wider research project exploring collaboration within rehabilitation teams. The research approach was informed by hermeneutic phenomenology. Insights gained through this project led to the development of two models: the first conceptualising collaboration in relation to domains of process, product and players; the other model proposing the notion of collaborative arenas. The model of collaborative arenas recognises the blurred boundaries and interrelated team memberships that occur in rehabilitation teams. Both models informed ongoing data collection and analysis for this research project and have potential to inform conceptualisation of teams and collaboration for other researchers.

Interprofessional education: does recent literature from rural settings offer insights into what really matters?

As rural health staff of different disciplines often know one another and share workplace facilities, rural areas are well suited to the implementation of interprofessional education (IPE) strategies. Details of such strategies are often shared in journal articles so that educators can learn from and build on the experiences of others. A common theme in the apparent success of rural interprofessional initiatives concerns collaborative relationships among educators. However, do readers of journals see the full picture of the collaborative relationships among educators of different disciplines as they plan and implement strategies?

Educators working together for interprofessional education: From "fragmented beginnings" to being "intentionally interprofessional".

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of interprofessional relationships between healthcare educators working together for interprofessional education (IPE). As part of a collaborative dialogical inquiry, data from 19 semi-structured interviews and 9 focus groups were used to explore how IPE educators develop shared purpose to help students learn to work with other health professions. Consistent with this methodology, the research group and study participants comprised educators from eight different professions. Questions asked of the data, using a lens of intersubjectivity, included: “What implicit assumptions are brought to interactions?” and “What happens to these assumptions as educators interact?” The emergent themes caution against assuming that all educators initially bring to interprofessional spaces only positive attitudes towards all professions. Educators beginning in a fragmented interprofessional space needed to reflect on earlier negative experiences with particular professions for reframing in a socially aware interprofessional space to enable collaborating in an intentional interprofessional space.

Health Practice Relationships

This book, and this chapter, explore health practice relationships. This chapter sets the scene for the book and privileges the humanity and diversity of social and practice relationships that this title evokes. In Chapter 2 we turn to the topic of professional practice, placing this book predominantly in the context of Western orthodox medicine today, and we place the clients, support people and healthcare providers at the centre of our discussion.

Educating for collaborative practice: an interpretation of current achievements and thoughts for future directions

The Edinburgh Declaration, developed in 1998 as a pledge to alter the character of medical education to more effectively meet the needs of society, included a recommendation to increase the opportunity for joint learning between health and health‐related professions, as part of the training for teamwork. This article acknowledges achievements since the Declaration in relation to this recommendation, using an umbrella term for the phenomenon, ‘educating for collaborative practice’, and presents a perspective framed as a series of questions to encourage reflection on future directions.

Educators’ Interprofessional Collaborative Relationships: Helping Pharmacy Students Learn to Work with Other Professions

Similar to other professions, pharmacy educators use workplace learning opportunities to prepare students for collaborative practice. Thus, collaborative relationships between educators of different professions are important for planning, implementing and evaluating interprofessional learning strategies and role modelling interprofessional collaboration within and across university and workplace settings. However, there is a paucity of research exploring educators’ interprofessional relationships. Using collaborative dialogical inquiry we explored the nature of educators’ interprofessional relationships in a co-located setting. Data from interprofessional focus groups and semi-structured interviews were interpreted to identify themes that transcended the participants’ professional affiliations. Educators’ interprofessional collaborative relationships involved the development and interweaving of five interpersonal behaviours: being inclusive of other professions; developing interpersonal connections with colleagues from other professions; bringing a sense of own profession in relation to other professions; giving and receiving respect to other professions; and being learner-centred for students’ collaborative practice. Pharmacy educators, like other educators, need to ensure that interprofessional relationships are founded on positive experiences rather than vested in professional interests.

Researching collaboration and collaborating

In designing a research strategy to investigate the phenomena of collaborating and collaboration in Anne’s doctoral thesis (Croker, 2011) the research team discussed many options that could do justice to different aspects of these phenomena.

The RESPECT Model of Collaboration

At the heart of this book lie two intensely human phenomena: collaboration and respect. Collaboration is the complex set of actions, engagements and purposes reflected in the research and practice development narratives presented in this book. Respect, we contend, is the way that collaboration needs to be pursued.

Valuing Ordered and Organic Collaboration

As I started my conversation with the vast literature on collaboration, I was reminded of the fable of the blind men describing an elephant where each man described characteristics of a different part without an overall view of the whole: thus an elephant was deemed to be like a rope (tail), fan (ear), tree trunk (leg), spear (tusk) and wall (stomach).