Navigating Interprofessional Spaces: Experiences of Clients Living with Parkinson’s Disease, Students and Clinical Educators

ABSTRACT

When students in interprofessional education and practice programmes partner with clients living with a long-term condition, the potential for a better client and educational experience is enhanced when the focus is on client self-management and empowerment. This paper reports the findings from a phenomenological study into the experiences of five clients, six speech language therapy students, eight physiotherapy students, and two clinical educators participating in a university clinic-based interprofessional programme for clients living in the community with Parkinson’s Disease. Collaborative hermeneutic analysis was conducted to interpret the texts from client interviews and student and clinical educator focus groups held immediately after the programme. The overarching narratives emerging from the texts were: “client-centredness”; “who am I/why am I here?”; “understanding interprofessional collaboration and development”; “personal and professional development, awareness of self and others”; “the environment - safety and support”. These narratives and the meanings within them were drawn together to develop a tentative metaphor-based framework of “navigating interprofessional spaces” showing how the narratives and meanings are connected. The framework identifies a temporal journey toward interprofessional collaboration impacted by diverse identities and understandings of self and others, varying expectations and interpretations of the programme, intra- and interpersonal, cultural and contextual spaces, and uncertainty. Shifts in being and doing and uncertainty appear to characterise client-driven, self-management focused interprofessional teamwork for all participants. These findings indicate that students need ongoing opportunities to share explicit understandings of interprofessional teamwork and dispel assumptions, since isolated interprofessional experiences may only begin to address these temporal processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Hermeneutic phenomenology
• interprofessional education
• interprofessional practice
• Parkinson’s disease
• physiotherapy
• speech-language therapy

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge and thank the clients and students who gave generously of their time to take part in this research. We also thank Gemma Alder for completing a literature search for us, and the School of Interprofessional Studies at Auckland University of Technology for covering our transcribing costs.

Declaration of interest

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