Two-facility longitudinal study on the effect of team medical education based on collaboration with WHO and development in Asia

Abstract

The Global Health Workforce Network (GHWN), formerly Global Health Workforce Aliance, is a broad term which challenges the problems surrounding a severe health workforce shortage. In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) calculated that to attain a high coverage of skilled birth attendance, there was a minimum requirement of 2.28 physicians, nurses and midwives for every 1,000 people in a population. However, statistics prepared by WHO back over a decade ago suggested that 57 countries around the world fell below this threshold, this meant that an additional 4.3 million health workers were needed to fill the shortage. Fast forward to 2019 and there still appears to be a significant shortage. For that reason, there have been many investigations into how best to solve this problem – one that will only get worse as the global population continues to grow. One strategy that has been identified is interprofessional education (IPE), which is a pedagogical approach that aims to prepare health professions students by placing them in a collaborative team environment. The idea is relatively straightforward: improve the overall quality of healthcare by putting students from two or more professions in health and social care together, so that they can each learn from the others and cultivate collaborative practice (CP), which may also contribute to patient safety.