Interprofessional teamwork is essential for delivering safe, high-quality stroke care, yet effective coordination across professions remains challenging. As part of a quality improvement project, we conducted a cross-sectional study to assess baseline interprofessional teamwork on an acute inpatient stroke unit, focusing on relational coordination (RC) and psychological safety. An electronic survey was completed by 53 healthcare team members (n = 137), including attending-physicians (senior physicians), trainee-physicians (fellows and residents), nurses, and other allied health professionals. Overall, RC scores were moderate (within professions: 4.10-4.60; between professions: 3.50-4.00), except for attending physicians and medical trainees, whose RC was strong (4.57). Perceptions were non-reciprocal: attending-physicians and medical trainees rated RC with nurses and other professions as strong (>4.00), while those groups rated RC with them as weak (<3.50). Psychological safety, lowest among nurses, significantly accounted for the association between profession and RC communication. These findings highlight gaps in interprofessional teamwork and underscore the importance of structured interventions. Insights from this study informed the adaptation of an interprofessional bedside rounding model to strengthen communication, enhance psychological safety, and foster collaborative stroke care.
Indigenous health navigation promotes access to healthcare for Indigenous people. This descriptive single case study focuses on an Indigenous navigation program within a Montreal non-Indigenous community-based organization offering outreach healthcare in the streets for people experiencing homelessness. Our research aims to identify the nature of interprofessional collaboration within the healthcare team and to document the factors influencing it. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight members of the organization (navigators, nurses, and a manager) and analyzed with a hybrid (deductive and inductive) thematic analysis. Seven field observation sessions allowed additional nuance. Data highlighted that collaboration could facilitate access to culturally safe care, address holistic needs, and help face complexity and unpredictability intrinsic to offering healthcare in the streets. Challenges in collaboration can arise from differing experiences and perceptions, limited mutual understanding, and role ambiguity. Results show that tensions within the team were associated with the formation of subgroups among people sharing common cultural backgrounds and experiences, but individual positive relationships between members of subgroups allowed better mutual understanding. The results point to supportive practices such as diversity training, shared trust building, and reflexivity as essential to fostering collaboration.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is often positioned as preparation for interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP), yet how students learn to enact IPCP as they move from online IPE to community-based practice remains insufficiently understood. This instrumental qualitative case study examined undergraduate health professions students' learning within an IPE program at a Colombian university that connected online modules with rural community-based primary care. Data were collected between October 2024 and March 2025 from students in medicine, psychology, physiotherapy, and speech therapy through nine semi-structured interviews, one focus group, one dyadic interview, and two non-participant observations during rural fieldwork. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis followed by interpretive synthesis. Three themes were identified: understanding collaborative practice in healthcare; barriers to learning collaborative practice; and situated conditions supporting collaborative learning. Together, these themes generated an explanatory model of the IPE-IPCP transition composed of conceptual scaffolding, situated participation, reflection-in-practice, and power negotiation. These findings suggest that the IPE-IPCP transition is less a transfer of competencies than a process through which students learn to enact IPCP by reflecting on and negotiating professional hierarchy. Blended IPE should help facilitators turn emerging power asymmetries in practice settings into opportunities for such enactment.
This short report aims to bring evidence from modern psychometric methods (item response theory; IRT) to bear on a general team measure (Teamwork Questionnaire; FAT) adopted specifically for interprofessional education (IPE). The FAT was administered to n = 160 mixed-health-profession participants in a post-IPE questionnaire. IRT analyses examine the following three aspects of the FAT: 1) scale dimensionality, 2) subscale reliability, and 3) item bias. Firstly, findings support FAT overall reliability but fail to support subscale reliabilities. Secondly, findings indicate a strong, general factor underlying the FAT that supports unidimensional interpretations. Thirdly, item bias assessment indicated insubstantial differences across student and facilitator groups, supporting the retention of all FAT items in future IPE administrations. Taken together, we find sufficient evidence to support the FAT's application within an IPE context, and future research should aim to inspect its responsivity (change) over time.
The number of interprofessional training wards (ITWs), which differ in their local specifics, is growing world-wide. Quality management of interprofessional education (IPE) on ITWs depends on the commitment of the local people involved. Literature addressing issues of quality assurance of ITWs is missing. Thus, minimum standards were defined in a multi-stage approach involving 24 experts and different methods. From 45 quality criteria, local experts first derived and consented on Mannheim's draft of 26 minimum standards following the SHELF protocol. Next, external experts validated and commented on the proposed minimum standards in an online survey. Agreement levels varied (64%-100%). Collaborative inductive content analysis of the comments contributed to refine the final wording of the recommended location-independent minimum standards. A trial with our ITW indicated which minimum standards were met completely, partially, or not at all. Expert judgment from different ITW expert groups were valuable for obtaining meaningful and precisely worded minimum standards. While majority votes gave an indication, deliberative discussions proved to be decisive to arrive at "wise" expert-based outcomes. The checklist of the recommended minimum standards is easy to use for (re)assessing the quality of IPE on ITWs and can serve as a benchmark to make IPE on ITWs comparable.
