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ABSTRACT
With the current interest in interprofessional collaboration in health care as a response to ever-increasing complexity of health issues and scarcity of resources, many higher education institutions are developing interprofessional education (IPE) programs. However, there has been little empirical work on what. With the current interest for interprofessional collaboration in health care ever-increasing knowledge and skills are required to work collaboratively between health professions. We have undertaken to describe interprofessional collaboration as a practice largely underpinned by tacit knowledge acquired by experienced clinicians. Clinicians from all health professions in a large francophone university in Eastern Canada were invited to participate in explicitation interviews. Explicitation interviews require participants to freely recall an interprofessional collaboration event (e.g., team meeting or joint care delivery) and describe specific actions they personally enacted. An experienced health professional encounters many interprofessional situations over time; the actions they describe reflect their personal theories about the practice. Hence, it is highly probable that they use them frequently when working with colleagues in clinical settings. Unveiled tacit knowledge was divided into four themes: the importance of a sense of belonging to a team, the imperative to meet face-to-face, the practice of soliciting the working hypotheses of colleagues, and the art of summarizing meeting discussions.
Declaration of Interest
The authors of this article have no potential conflicts of interest to report.
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Nicolas Fernandez
Nicolas Fernandez is Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Emergency Medicine at the Université de Montréal. For the past decade he has investigated teamwork and collaboration in the Health Sciences and has implemented innovative research approaches.
Jessica Cyr
Jessica Cyr is a qualified nurse and holds a Master's degree in Nursing. She is currently completing medical training and will pursue a research career in medical education and a career as a family physician.
Isabelle Perreault
Isabelle Perreault is an Early Childhood Educator and a Master's student in the Faculty of Education. She has worked extensively in the field of recognizing experiential learning and elucidating tacit knowledge.
Isabelle Brault
Isabelle Brault is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at Université de Montréal. She specializes in nursing administration. She also oversees the Collaboration and Patient Partnership program that offers the interprofessional education curriculum.