“Understanding where you're coming from”: Discovering an [inter]professional identity through becoming a peer facilitator

Abstract

Peer facilitation offers an innovative and effective means of promoting interprofessional learning (IPL) between health and social care students. This paper highlights the benefits that peer facilitators themselves experience from involvement in assisting junior colleagues to engage with IPL in an online context. The setting for the inquiry is an online interprofessional learning pathway shared by two higher education institutions in the UK. Insights have been developed over a 3-year period through collaborative inquiry with 41 peer facilitators, academic tutors and the students who benefitted from their input. This paper which focuses on peer facilitators' application data, interview data and written reflections explores the instrumental, cognitive and personal gains experienced. However, more fundamentally, theorizing findings in relation to identity theory we substantiate the claim that the role provides opportunity for testing and refining important aspects of both professional and interprofessional identities.

Keywords::

• E-learning
• facilitation
• health and social care
• interprofessional learning
• interviews
• professional identity
• qualitative method

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the students for their enormous commitment and enthusiasm for making the initiative work.

Declaration of interest

We would like to thank the Higher Education Academy, Health Science and Practice Subject Centre, who as well as sponsoring this research provided support and encouragement during the project. The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.