Co-authored by Dr Helen Benson and Professor Emma Power.
Have you ever experienced a health issue where different specialists had to work together to diagnose a problem, prescribe treatment or plan long-term support? Did those health professionals talk like a team, or act like individual experts each with their own aims and interests? Were you left feeling calm and confident, or confused about what to do next?
Effective collaboration among health professionals is crucial for improving patient outcomes. Coordinating care can be challenging in healthcare systems, which is why preparing students for team-based environments is a cornerstone of modern healthcare education. Since 2018, a dedicated team from the Graduate School of Health (GSH) has been developing cutting-edge online interprofessional education (IPE) modules for students in speech pathology, clinical psychology, orthoptics, genetic counselling, physiotherapy, and pharmacy.
Mind the interprofessional gap
In a busy rural community health centre, 5 year-old Jayda waits anxiously for her overdue speech therapy appointment after being diagnosed with a speech sound disorder 8 months ago. She has also recently been diagnosed with ADHD, but after chatting with the local pharmacist, her parents are unsure about whether to start medication or not. The care team currently includes a social worker, Aboriginal health worker, and speech pathologist along with the community Health administration staff. Despite the best individual efforts of the team, Jayda’s family are struggling with poor communication, conflicting advice and disjointed care plans which have led to missed referrals and treatment delays.
Edited excerpt from case study
Cases like these highlight the critical need for interprofessional education amongst health professions, ensuring healthcare teams collaborate effectively to provide the best care possible.
Our project began with comprehensive surveys of students, clinical educators, and staff to identify key challenges and areas of focus for IPE. Using this feedback, we tailored our content to address these needs, emphasising allied health professions in the UTS Graduate School of Health as well as other relevant fields.
We based our modules on research evidence and international IPE competencies, incorporating adult learning principles and diverse online teaching strategies. Our aim was to address a notable gap in IPE teaching and assessment, as outlined in our strategic plan. Previous efforts often lacked a holistic, interprofessional approach and minimal assessment. Our new modules, however, offer a comprehensive interprofessional perspective and include a brief quiz for assessment, covering 4-6 hours of case-based content.
Collaboration in content and practice
The initial module introduces core concepts of interprofessional education, while subsequent modules delve into types of teams, discipline-specific roles, shared healthcare ethics and values, and effective interprofessional communication and teamwork skills.
These modules provide a whole of cohort approach to delivering students with foundational IPE knowledge to support other IPE initiatives and their subsequent clinical placements. After finalising the Canvas site development in 2022 and piloting the modules in 2023, we successfully integrated them as assessable tasks in 2024.
The feedback from students and staff has been instrumental in refining the modules. Staff reported using the online modules in flexible ways including embedded throughout a 14-week subject or as its own module over 2 weeks within a subject, aligned with the overall subject content. Most students rated their knowledge of other professions as improved, and noted that the knowledge was useful for their development as clinicians. Student feedback reflected multiple benefits, including “real life/like examples that are well tailored to multiple disciplines”, “video examples [that] helped further my understanding of the concepts” and “the consolidation quizzes and applying it to the same case study throughout”.
It takes a village…
This initiative represents a significant leap forward in interprofessional education, demonstrating our commitment to enhancing healthcare training and equipping students with the skills needed for successful teamwork in their future careers. The team will continue to enhance the modules engaging further with UTS faculties and Schools that have shown interest (e.g. Sports and Exercise Science) and incorporating new knowledge and technologies.
The original development team included Emma Power (Speech Pathology and Chair), Erika Penney (Clinical Psychology), Peter Stubbs (Physiotherapy), Felicia Adinanto (Orthoptics), Lucinda Freeman (Genetic Counselling), Bronwyn Nolan, and Nicola Price (Educational Design), along with former members Chris Jacobs (Genetic Counselling) and Beata Bajorek (Pharmacy). Danielle Manton provided essential insights on Indigenous learning content, and Lisa Dive (Genetic Counselling) contributed expertise on ethics and values. Helen Benson (Pharmacy) joined the team in 2022.