Supporting ethics educators in Canadian occupational therapy and physical therapy programs: A national interprofessional knowledge exchange project

ABSTRACT

Ethics education is the cornerstone of professional practice, fostering knowledge and respect for core ethical values among healthcare professionals. Ethics is also a subject well-suited for interprofessional education and collaboration. However, there are few initiatives to gather experiences and share resources among ethics educators in rehabilitation. We thus undertook a knowledge exchange project to: 1) share knowledge about ethics training across Canadian occupational and physical therapy programs, and 2) build a community of educators dedicated to improving ethics education. The objectives of this paper are to describe this interprofessional knowledge exchange project involving ethics educators (with a diversity of professional and disciplinary backgrounds) from Canadian occupational and physical therapy programs as well as analyze its outcomes based on participants’ experiences/perceptions. Two knowledge exchange strategies were employed: an interactive one-day workshop and a wiki platform. An immediate post-workshop questionnaire evaluated the degree to which participants’ expectations were met. Structured telephone interviews 9–10 months after the workshop collected participants’ perceptions on whether (and if so, how) the project influenced their teaching or led to further interprofessional collaborations. Open-ended questions from the post-workshop questionnaires and individual interviews were analyzed using qualitative methods. Of 40 ethics educators contacted, 23 participated in the workshop and 17 in the follow-up interview. Only 6 participants logged into the wiki from its launch to the end of data collection. Five themes emerged from the qualitative analysis: 1) belonging and networking; 2) sharing and collaborating; 3) changing (or not) ways of teaching ethics; 4) sustaining the network; and 5) envisioning the future of ethics education. The project attained many of its goals, despite encountering some challenges. While the wiki platform proved to be of limited benefit in advancing the project goals, the interactive format and collaborative nature of the one-day workshop were described as rewarding and effective in bringing together occupational therapy and physical therapy educators to meet, network, and share knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Interprofessional education
• interprofessional ethics
• knowledge exchange
• occupational therapy
• physical therapy
• rehabilitation

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the ethics educators who participated with such great enthusiasm in the CREW KE project. We thank Renaud Boulanger, Erin Ashley Douglas, Sabrina Morin Chabane and Tatiana Orozco for their assistance during the CREW day. We also thank Erin for conducting the post-CREW day interviews with participants. We thank Pascal Desrochers for his summer project dedicated to the “CREW day wiki”, Stéphane Boutin and Émilie White for the technological support and Mathieu-Joël Gervais and Lynda Rey their comments on an earlier version of this project.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the writing and content of this article.

Notes

1. There are currently 29 OT and PT programs in Canada. However, at the time of the research project, one program was newly launched and had yet to provide ethics teaching to students, and online information was not available for the other.

2. French citations presented in the text have been freely translated by an English-speaking member of the research team.

3. To preserve participants’ anonymity, we used the feminin form for all participants’ descriptors.

Additional information

Funding

Anne Hudon is supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Santé (FRQ-S) and was supported by a scholarship from the MENTOR program in collaboration with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Quebec Research Rehabilitation Network (REPAR) at the time of the study. Maude Laliberté held a doctoral fellowship from the FRQ-S. Matthew Hunt is supported by a research scholar award from the FRQ-S. This project was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR-EOG-120255), the Edith Strauss Rehabilitation Research Project Foundation, the Canadian Council of Physiotherapy University Programs (CCPUP & CPA), the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR), and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Montreal.