Journal of interprofessional care
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Multicenter Study
An ethnographic investigation of junior doctors' capacities to practice interprofessionally in three teaching hospitals.
Collaborative practice among early career staff is at the bedrock of interprofessional care. This study investigated factors influencing the enactment of interprofessional practice by using the day-to-day role of six junior doctors in three teaching hospitals as a gateway to understand the various professions' interactive behaviours. The contextual framework used for the study was Strauss' theory of negotiated order. ⋯ The constraints of short training terms and pressure from multi-faceted demands on junior doctors can interfere with the establishment of meaningful relationships with nurses and other health professionals. The realisation of sustained interprofessional practice is, therefore, practically and structurally difficult. Enabling factors supporting the sharing of expertise are outweighed by barriers associated with professional and hospital organisational cultures, poor interprofessional communication, and the pressure of competing individual task demands in the course of daily practice.
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Competency-based education and practice have become foundational for developing interprofessional education (IPE) and interprofessional collaboration. There has been a plethora of competencies developed in these areas recently, both at individual institutions and nationally; however, their effective integration and thus potential has not been fully realized educationally. ⋯ They are applicable to learning activities both within the classroom and the clinic, as well as to lifelong learning. This paper defines and describes milestones and EPAs, considers the importance of their application to IPE, and summarizes a future research project that will identify EPAs for an IPE curriculum.
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Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a core skill of health professionals and one that is regularly taught in health sciences programs. This report covers the design and results of an interprofessional EBP workshop at a large university aimed at improving faculty's confidence in practicing and teaching EBP. The two-day workshop was designed by the University's Health Sciences Libraries and emphasized small-group work, with the first day focused on critical appraisal and searching and the second on effective teaching strategies. ⋯ Attendees rated the workshop and individual lectures highly and reported that it improved their ability to both practice and teach EBP. In addition, they reported a preference for learning in an interprofessional environment. This report suggests that a short EBP workshop can improve faculty members' self-reported confidence and ability to practice and teach core EBP skills.
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Evidence suggests that breakdowns in communication and a lack of situation awareness contribute to poor performance of medical teams. In this pilot study, three interprofessional obstetrical teams determined the feasibility of using the situation awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT) during simulated critical event management of three obstetrical scenarios. After each scenario, teams were asked to complete questionnaires assessing their opinion of how their performance was affected by the introduction of questions during a SAGAT stop. ⋯ A team SAGAT score was determined by calculating the proportion of correct responses for each individual. Higher scores were associated with better adherence to outcome times, although not statistically significant. A robust study design building on our pilot data is needed to probe the differing interprofessional perceptions of SAGAT and the potential association between its scores and clinical outcome times.