Catrine Buck Jensen

Avhandlingen er tilgjengelig her!  The doctoral thesis!  Prøveforelesning over oppgitt emne holdes/ The trial lecture starts at 09.15 (Auditorium Cortex): “Best practices for the involvement of patients in nurse-led student interprofessional learning placements in the workplace”. Prøveforelseningen kan strømmes her/ The trail lecture can be streamed here.  Disputasen starter/ the defense starts at 11.15( Auditorium Cortex), og kan strømmes her/ can be streamed here. Auditoriet er åpent for publikum. Disputasen vil strømmes og et opptak vil være tilgjengelig i et døgn. The auditorium is open to the public. The defense will still be streamed, and a recording of the disputation will be available for 24 hours.

Populærvitenskapelig sammendrag av avhandlingen:

Healthcare services are changing as people get older, health workers are fewer, and there is an increase in diseases like cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, etc. Therefore, the organization and provision of health services are forced to change; consequently, we must also change how health workers are educated.  

Since the 1980s, the interprofessional collaboration between professionals, like medical doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists, has been highlighted as essential to ensure health services that can cope with the changes in health care. It has been emphasized that future health workers must be trained to work together from the day they graduate. It is also a goal to reduce fragmented health services and ensure that each patient´s voice is heard when care is provided; thus, this must be included in training for good-quality teamwork. Health professional students are most often offered opportunities to learn together in theoretical studies, online learning, and simulation with mannequins or actors; it has been harder to implement in clinical placements where students learn together with actual patients. Nevertheless, students are expected to work patient- and family-centered in interprofessional teams. We wanted to know more about what happens in interprofessional clinical placements and how patients are included when interacting with students. This dissertation, therefore, explores the patient role in interprofessional education for undergraduate health students in several clinical settings.

To find out more, we used different methods. First, we looked at former published research on interprofessional clinical placements and how the interaction between students and patients was described. Further, different student teams were observed in their interprofessional clinical placements when meeting patients to understand how they worked patient-centered in their teamwork. We also looked at how the student teams' supervisors were involved with the patient and how they talked about the patient's perspective when supervising students. After observing this, patients, students, and supervisors were interviewed about what had happened in their meetings. Data were then analyzed and resulted in three research papers.  

The three papers give insight into different perspectives on patient involvement in interprofessional education. Paper 1 shows how patients need to be included more in research on interprofessional education in clinical placements. Findings from the studies where we followed students in their clinical placements show that the patient is the center of attention in interprofessional student teams’ work and learning process. Despite this, the patients do not always feel included when meeting interprofessional student teams. Preliminary findings from the third paper show that interprofessional clinical placement supervisors are often absent in student teams’ interactions with patients. The supervision of interprofessional student teams seems to have foci on how the students learn with each other but not so much on how the patient may perceive the student teams and how they could work patient-centered. 

 This dissertation gives new perspectives on the involvement of patients in health professional education and interprofessional education. Our findings suggest a taken-for-grantedness when illuminating the patient view in clinical placements, which also appears in research on these learning activities. Educators must be concerned about allowing students to learn how to involve patients when learning teamwork—emphasizing the importance of the patient and how patient-centeredness can be enacted in encounters with patients. The students must have the chance to practice this with patients. The latter also includes ensuring competent supervisors in interprofessional clinical placements.

Hovedveileder/Main supervisor
Førsteamanuensis Anita Iversen, Senter for helsefaglig pedagogisk utvikling, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.

Biveiledere/Supervisors
Professor Madeleine A. Dahlgren, Linköpings universitet. 
Dosent Bente Norbye, Institutt for helse- og omsorgsfag, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.
 

Bedømmelseskomité/assessment committee
Associate professor Fiona Kent, Monash University - 1. opponent.
Professor Simon Kitto, University of Ottawa  - 2. opponent.
Førsteamanuensis Beate Garcia, Institutt for farmasi, UiT Norges arktiske universitet – leder av komité.

Disputasleder/Leader of defense: Førsteamanuensis Iris Borch, Senter for helsefaglig pedagogisk utvikling, Det helsevitenskapelige fakultet, UiT Norges arktiske universitet.