Interprofessional training for nursing and medical students in Norway: Exploring different professional perspectives

ABSTRACT

This article presents an explorative case study focusing on interprofessional training for medical and nursing students in Norway. Based on interviews with, and observations of, multiple stakeholder groups—students, university faculty, and hospital staff—content analysis was applied to investigate their perspectives regarding the design of such educational training. The findings revealed a positive perspective amongst stakeholders while voicing some concerns related to how communication issues, collaboration, workflow, and professional role patterns should be reflected in such training. Based on our data analysis we derive three themes that must be considered for successful interprofessional training of nursing and medical students: clinical professionalism, team performance, and patient-centered perspective. These themes must be balanced contingent on the students’ background and the learning objectives of future interprofessional training efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Case study
• interprofessional education
• interprofessional teamwork
• interprofessional training
• Nordic context
• qualitative methods

Notes

1. All of the participants spoke Norwegian, which was the language of the interviews. Translation inevitably introduces the risk of some loss of meaning, particularly when statements have been uttered in informal settings. Nevertheless, English and Norwegian are fairly similar languages, to the point that most statements – including many colloquialisms – may be translated directly without change of meaning. In cases where the translation of quotes may introduce ambiguity, we have added comments to explain and clarify the meaning. Frequently appearing in the interview material, the term “parameters” is used by healthcare workers to denote a set of clinical data – including blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate and respiratory frequency – that tend to follow each patient. To “obtain” or “measure the parameters” is the same as to take vital signs.

2. SBAR – Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation – is a communication tool constructed to function as a checklist and to structure the team’s exchange of information (Haig, Sutton & Whittington, 2006).

3. ABCDE – Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability, Exposure –is a communication protocol for immediate patient assessment recommended by the Resuscitation Council of the United Kingdom (2008).

4. The citation is translated directly from Norwegian. We have interpreted the term “capital,” to refer to Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1986).

Additional information

Funding

This study was accomplished with financial support from The Laerdal Foundation for Acute Medicine under support number 1007.