Interprofessional education and practice guide: designing ethics-orientated interprofessional education for health and social care students

ABSTRACT

Health and social care professionals are required to work together to deliver person-centered care. Professionals therefore find themselves making decisions within multidisciplinary teams. For educators, there has been a call to bring students from differing professions together to learn to enable more effective teamwork, interprofessional communication, and collaborative practice. This multidisciplinary working is complicated by the increasingly complex nature of ethical dilemmas that health and social care professionals face. It is therefore widely recognized that the teaching and learning of ethics within health and social care courses is valuable. In this paper, we briefly make the case in support of teaching and learning health and social care ethics through the medium of interprofessional education (IPE). The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance to educators intending to design ethics-orientated IPE for health and social care students. The guidance is based on the ongoing experiences of designing and implementing ethics-orientated IPE across five departments within two universities located in the North of England over a five-year period. Descriptions of the ethics-orientated IPE activities are included in the guide, along with key resources recommended.

KEYWORDS:

• Clinical psychology
• ethics
• interprofessional education
• medicine
• paramedicine
• social work

Key Resources

UK Clinical Ethics Network: http://www.ukcen.net/provides background information on clinical ethics, frameworks that can be used when discussing ethical cases, and case studies.

Institute of Medical Ethics: http://www.instituteofmedicalethics.org/website/provides curriculum content guidance as well as teaching and learning resources on medical ethics including video clips, films, journal articles, textbooks, websites.

The College of Paramedics: https://www.collegeofparamedics.co.uk/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI7raTgIzm1wIVTrXtCh1sXg5NEAAYASAAEgJ_CPD_BwE provides free e-learning packages for paramedics that include case studies reviewing legal and ethical aspects of paramedicine.

The British Psychological Society Guidance on Teaching and Assessment of Ethical Competence in Psychology Education (2015) provides information on appropriate ethical knowledge and practice at all levels of study in psychology https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/beta.bps.org.uk/files/Policy%20-%20Files/Guidance%20on%20Teaching%20and%20Assessment%20of%20Ethical%20Competence%20in%20Psychology%20Education%20(2015).pdf

The Higher Education Academy provides a series of searchable blogs and Knowledge Hub Resources, www.heacademy.ac.uk

Thomas, J. & Baron, S. (2012) Curriculum Guide: Interprofessional and inter-agency collaboration. London: The College of Social Work Available at https://www.basw.co.uk/resource/?id=4829

The British Association of Social Workers promotes a Code of Ethics for all social workers to abide by available at: https://www.basw.co.uk/codeofethics/

A curriculum guide to support the development of interprofessional education is hosted by the British Association of Social Workers and available at: https://exchange.lancs.ac.uk/owa/redir.aspx?C=K_Id8NUoW_8yFGWNTMnBdqJ7DBJAsIw50HiLFwc9niSkui4KFDvVCA.&URL=https%3a%2f%2fwww.basw.co.uk%2fresource%2f%3fid%3d4829

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the senior management teams within our departments and institutions for their continued support towards our ethics-orientated IPE. We also would like to thank all the facilitators within our departments who make ethics-orientated IPE possible. Finally, we wish to thank our students for engaging so willingly in our ethics-orientated IPE.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Mindful of the range of terms that can be used to describe the people that each health and social care professional interacts with such as patients, clients, service users, a number of inclusive phrases have been agreed upon between authors, e.g., “serving individuals, families, and communities” and “person-centered services” in order to accommodate the differences between professional groups.

2. A range of descriptors can be used for ethics within each professional curriculum such as medical, clinical, healthcare. In this manuscript, the authors opted for the umbrella term “health and social care ethics” in order to accommodate the diversity in terminology.