Evaluating interprofessional education from a community nurse and social work student perspective

Abstract

The aim of our research was to explore the effectiveness of interprofessional education by exploring changes in students' thinking before and after a course. This article reports a study of an interprofessional education module entitled ‘Interprofessional working in health and social services: a lifecycle approach’ which ran at the University of Reading. The methodology adopted was a personal construct psychology (PCP) approach and involved eliciting repertory grids from six community nurse and five social work students both before and after they had participated in the interprofessional module. The results of the study and the discussion highlight some key issues for interprofessional education and areas for future work. The use of the grids uncovered aspects of student thinking that would have remained hidden had more traditional curriculum approaches been used. Students did make some changes in their thinking towards greater shared understanding which provided evidence of effective interprofessional education. Some criticisms of PCP as a research methodology are made, but it is also acknowledged that as a research methodology for interprofessional education it offers enormous potential to capture the shared meanings between different professional groups