Abstract
BackgroundPalliative care often requires inter-professional collaboration, offering opportunities to learn from each other. General practitioners often collaborate with specialized palliative home care teams. This study seeks to identify what, how and from whom health care professionals learn during this collaboration.MethodsCross-sectional survey in Belgium. All palliative home care teams were invited to participate. General practitioners (n = 267) and palliative care nurses (n = 73) filled in questionnaires.ResultsGeneral practitioners (GPs) and palliative care nurses learned on all palliative care aspects. Different learning activities were used. Participants learned from all others involved in patient care. The professionals’ discipline influences the content, the way of learning and who learns from whom. Multiple linear regression shows significant but limited association of gender with amount of learning by GPs (M < F; p = 0.042; Adj R2 = 0.07) and nurses (M > F; p = 0.019; Adj R2 = 0.01).ConclusionsThis study is the first to reveal what, how and from whom learning occurs during collaboration in palliative care. Training professionals in sharing expertise during practice and in detecting and adequately responding to others’ learning needs, could optimize this way of learning.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-014-0501-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Palliative care often requires inter-professional collaboration, offering opportunities to learn from each other
research questions (RQ) 1: What do General practitioners (GPs) and palliative home care teams (PHCTs) nurses learn during collaborative practice?
RQ 2: How do GPs and PHCT nurses learn during collaborative practice?
Summary
Palliative care often requires inter-professional collaboration, offering opportunities to learn from each other. The literature provides no benchmark on how much and in what way professionals learn during inter-professional collaboration Before promoting this way of learning, we need to further explore it, as it is currently unknown to what extent (how much and in what way) WPL occurs in primary palliative care (care for palliative patients in primary health care, i.e., by GPs and the primary health care team). We draw on existing standards (e.g., the European Association for Palliative Care curriculum suggestions for content) and theoretical frameworks (e.g., a typology of workplace learning activities) to decide on the selected variables. This will further be explained in the Methods section. This study seeks to fill the literature gap by answering the following research questions (RQ): Primary questions
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