The Skills Acquired From Collaborative Learning And How They May Be Applied

This allowed for first-hand experience of inter-professional relationships and its effects on efficient health care1. However, in a 2006 report by Hugh Barr and colleagues it was recommended that professional education should have academic IPE opportunities that allow students to learn and engage with other HCPs early in their learning before they are put into real health care situations where team work is required5. The motive behind this recommendation was that early exposure would create awareness between professional disciplines that would help prevent bias between disciplines and help students to engage in inter-professional behaviours, such as understanding professional scopes of practice, that would become integral for their careers as they moved

Reflective practice is the process that enables individuals to achieve better understanding of themselves, their understanding, their skills, competencies and their workplace practices in general.

Another important aspect of healthcare is effective interprofessional practice. This allows practitioners from different disciplines to work together to provide the best care for patients. There are four areas of competency in interprofessional collaborative practice. They are values/ethics, roles/responsibilities, interprofessional communication, and teams/teamwork (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2011). Each of these areas contribute to skilled interprofessional

Hall and Waver ( 2001) defines Interprofessional as a group of professionals from different disciplines such as nurses, doctors, pharmacist that are working and communicating with each other while providing their knowledge, skills and attributes to enhance and support the contributions of others. Suter et al (2009) also said that the ability to work in an interprofessional team to convey collaborative, patient-centered care is an important aspect of professional practice that involves a possession of a particular set of competencies, such as communication skills. In relation to (Weinstein et al., 2003) Collaboration is the collection of knowledge, skills, values and motives which transforms to effective practice when applied by practitioners.

It has been said that “effective teamwork and communication in healthcare helps the functioning of the team itself, however, for a patient it is pivotal, and in some cases can be the difference between life and death” (Knox & Simpson, 2004; Mickan, 2005). Inter-professional Education – IPE- can be defined as “occasions when two or more professions learn from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care” (CAIPE, 1997 revised). Therefore, Inter-professional Education is an integral mechanism in establishing the key teamwork and communication skills that will need to be implemented in a healthcare setting in the future as “no one individual will have all the knowledge and skills required to meet the needs of patients” (Reeves et al, 2010). My reflection of this IPE experience will be based upon both the Kolb Cycle (Kolb, 1984) and the Tuckman model (Tuckman, 1965).

Interprofessional practice is widely researched, and is held in high regard within education and policy; the issue is the lack of evidence of this collaboration being implemented within the health care system and hospitals (Kenny, 2002). Multidisciplinary care allows for multiple professions to work alongside each other, while working towards their own individual goals. Meanwhile, interprofessional practice involves all professionals working together as a team towards one goal, which is the overall health of the patient (Botten, 2012). Kenny (2002) suggests that interprofessional practice is an opportunity to diminish any power barriers, and considers all other professionals roles and responsibilities. This allows different professions to care for a patient based on their education, skills, specialties, and experiences. Botten (2012) proposes that this leads to a number of different perspectives, shared responsibilities, a decrease in medical errors and enhanced staff morale. The concept of different professionals working together is crucial in patient care because as stated previously, not one profession could possibly care for all of the needs of modern patients (Hilton et al., 2002). Research suggests that one reason for not implementing interprofessional practice is the

This essay will consider the interprofessional group work, which was undertaken for the Foundations of Interprofessional Practice (FIP) module to produce a poster presentation, by reflecting on the experience. Reflection is an important skill for learning development both personally and professionally; reflecting on experiences enables ongoing improvements to be implemented, particularly in healthcare settings, ensuring knowledgeable and safe practice (Helyer, 2015; Jasper, 2013). Models of reflection include Gibbs’ (1988) reflective cycle, which will be used within this essay and includes six stages of description; feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and action planning.

Costs and financial constraints also play a major role in limiting the scope of IPEs. (Pecukonis, Doyle & Bliss, 2008) Communication and collaboration among health professionals are impeded by a general lack of understanding of the roles of various professions. More effective one-on-one education and interaction on a personal level between team members can help to facilitate passing of information from the health professional to another. In addition, many students view interprofessional education in a negative light due to prejudices towards other professions.

From this class I understood that Interprofessional Education (IPE) is when two or more profession learn from, with and about each other. This collaboration is important in order to fulfill the patients’ needs that are becoming more complex, multi-faced and challenging day by day. It is also clear to me that no single profession in healthcare can adequately address all the demands of patients. Therefore, partnership between teams is required to provide a safe, timely, effective and equitable patient care. To have a smooth collaboration, it is necessary to learn from each other’s specializations, strength and experiences. In the real world, healthcare is an interdisciplinary team effort to provide the best possible service to a patient based on evidence based practices. Considering this, I had the

Academic institutions play an important role in socializing students into professional roles specific to their discipline including discipline-specific codes of accepted and required practice. Traditionally, professional roles may conflict with the philosophy required in team-based health care, each provider acting as an island. Interprofessional education aims to address this problem.

The ability to become reflective in practice has become a necessary skill for health professionals. This is to ensure that health professionals are continuing with their daily learning and improving their practice. Reflective practice plays a big part in healthcare today and is becoming increasingly noticed.

Interprofessional education (IPE) is an extremely important approach in the academic field for preparing healthcare students to provide patient care in a collaborative team environment. IPE is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “a process that occurs when two or more professionals learn about, from, and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes”. The IPE has three components for collaborative patient-centered practice including “socializing health-care professionals to work together, developing mutual understanding and respect for various disciplines, and imparting collaborative practice competencies”. Numerous recently published studies highlighted the effectiveness and success of IPE as part of the education process.

Aside from the fact that inter-professional education has recorded commendable success among all stakeholders, as evidently reported in Cochrane reviews in which its effectiveness has shown tremendous positive improvement of professional practice and health care outcomes on the service users Inter-professional education Reeves et al. [2008]. In addition to the success and potential, it is believed that IPE has the potential to improve members of inter-professional health workers' clinical and medical knowledge and clinical skills. In spite of the recorded successes and potential to improve clinical and practice knowledge in inter-professional health settings, it is beginning to be noticed that these successes are not without their attendant

Interprofessional Education Practice is being embraced in many health and social care settings because of its positive effects on all stakeholders--service users, parents and guardians, workers, and institutions of learning--that are tasked with the responsibility of firmly establishing this health and social care innovation…. The general assumption, as I have noticed through my research, is that IPE is designed as a bridge between the gaps among all professionals involved in caring and providing support for clients in a health and social care settings (Edith Cowan University, 2011). An effective tool for developing efficiency and collaboration among health workers of different professions, IPE occurs when students or workers from two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes (Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education, 2002). Quoting from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), Jones and Phillips in their 2016 article “Social work and interprofessional education in health Care: A call for continued leadership,” revealed the reason why the IOM recommends that “health professionals should be educated to deliver patient-centered care as members of an interprofessional team” (p. 20). In an attempt to evaluate IPE outcomes for medical professions–medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, social work, pharmacy etc.–some selected undergraduate students’ performances were reviewed, and generally

My vision of collaborative learning is a learning strategy that affords the students enormous opportunities and advantages not available through traditional learning processes. I believe that students in a collaborative team tend to attain