Abstract
BackgroundLittle is known about the ways in which nursing and medical students perceive and understand their roles in interprofessional teamwork. A 2010 report by the World Health Organization highlights the importance of students’ understanding of teamwork in healthcare, and their ability to be effective team players. This study aims at describing nursing and medical students’ perceptions of interprofessional teamwork, focusing on experiences and recommendations that can be used to guide future educational efforts.MethodsThe study uses a qualitative research design. Data were collected from four focus group interviews: two homogenous groups (one with medical students, one with nursing students) and two mixed groups (medical and nursing students).ResultsThe results show that traditional patterns of professional role perception still prevail and strongly influence students’ professional attitudes about taking responsibility and sharing responsibility across disciplinary and professional boundaries. It was found that many students had experienced group cultures detrimental to team work. Focusing on clinical training, the study found a substantial variation in perception with regard to the different arenas for interprofessional teamwork, ranging from arenas with collaborative learning to arenas characterized by distrust, confrontation, disrespect and hierarchical structure.ConclusionsThis study underlines the importance of a stronger focus on interprofessional teamwork in health care education, particularly in clinical training. The study results suggest that the daily rounds and pre-visit “huddles,” or alternatively psychiatric wards, offer arenas suitable for interprofessional training, in keeping with the students’ assessments and criteria proposed in previous studies.
Highlights
Little is known about the ways in which nursing and medical students perceive and understand their roles in interprofessional teamwork
The results showed that nursing and medical students perceived responsibility differently; the nursing students were more inclined to share responsibility than the medical students, who regarded taking responsibility more as an individual obligation
Role perception The results presented in this study suggest that traditional patterns of professional role understanding reported in previous studies (Manias et al [25] and Fougner et al [26]) are still prevalent among medical and nursing students—in medical and nursing schools, as well as in clinical practice
Summary
Little is known about the ways in which nursing and medical students perceive and understand their roles in interprofessional teamwork. A 2010 report by the World Health Organization highlights the importance of students’ understanding of teamwork in healthcare, and their ability to be effective team players. The World Health Organization (WHO) has highlighted the importance of interprofessional teamwork and recommended educational programs that equip health care students with the necessary skills and competence to become effective team players [1,4]. International research [5,6,7] corroborates the position taken by the WHO, but studies reveal difficulties in implementing interprofessional educational efforts [2,3,5,8] and suggest that undergraduate education largely fails to address key elements, such as the understanding of professional roles, authority, hierarchy and gender related dimensions of teamwork [1,2,7,9]. Reviewing lessons learned from the Norwegian initiatives, Clark [12] concluded that the emerging positive outcomes have been somewhat impaired by lack of resources
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