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Lenz J.1,2, Probst A.1,2
1Gesundheitscampus Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, 2University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hildesheim/Holzminden/Goettingen, Hildesheim, Germany
Background: A profession's values guide its daily practice and professional behaviors. The professional and cultural beliefs and attitudes develop early during educational programs. Professional culture may contribute to the challenges of effective interprofessional teamwork. One recommendation by Hall et al was that interprofessional education should take place in the early phases of education to prevent development of negative stereotypes of other health care professionals and to promote willingness to engage in interprofessional learning activities.
Purpose: A new Health Care Campus was developed with the vision to create and to offer interprofessional learning sessions right from the early beginning. By doing this we want to utilize the impact of interprofessional education in the socialization process to increase opportunities for physiotherapist and other health care students to learn together, begin to collaborate more effectively together and to develop collaborative skills that can bring down the walls of the professional silos.
Methods: For the beginning two new study programs were developed and started in October 2016. BSc Nurse and BSc Therapeutical Sciences for physiotherapists (PT) and speech and language therapists (SLT). For every study program within this Health Care Campus exists a curriculum, which encompasses the whole study progress like a cloak. This cloak includes several modules in which at least the three health care professions named above come together to learn from, with and about each other. In addition to that there are three more modules, which spread over the study progress in which the PT, SLT and nurse students come together with physicians to collaborate and interact in practice-based internship projects.
Results: The study programs started in October 2016. At this stage the literature research and the development of the study programs are finished. We expect to have initial results regarding the socialization process, the willingness to engage in interprofessional action, after the second and third term at the End of 2017. Investigation tools will be developed and applied in a research project which is called InHAnds (Interprofessionelle Health Alliance Südniedersachsen). InHAnds is externally founded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
Conclusion(s): In Germany physiotherapists and health care professions normally were educated separately in silos. The interprofessional collaboration in the German Health Care System is upgradable and there is a need of health care professionals, who are used to work in teams effectively. In these study programs every stage from learning to acting within the fields of the Health Care System is considered and incorporated in it in order to promote willingness to engage in interprofessional activities and to empower the students to develop collaborative skills.
Implications: The professional and cultural beliefs and attitudes develop early during educational programs. Interprofessional education could prevent the development of negative stereotypes of other health care professionals and could promote willingness to engage in interprofessional activities. To collaborate more effectively together and to develop the according skills it seems to need more than just sitting together and learn from, with and about each other. It requires all stages of collaboration in real settings within the Health Care System.
Funding acknowledgements: The work was unfounded.
Topic: Education: continuing professional development
Ethics approval: Ethics approval was not required.
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
