Students’ learning in the workplace during their clinical placements is an important part of their education to become healthcare professionals. Despite the number of studies of student interprofessional learning in clinical placements, little is still known about the significance of interprofessional learning and how it is facilitated and arranged for to occur. This article aims to investigate interprofessional learning between students collaborating in a workplace-driven arrangement integrated into a clinical placement. A focused ethnographic research approach was applied, comprising observations of ten students participating in the arrangement organised by clinical supervisors on a medical emergency ward at a Swedish university hospital, followed by group interviews. Using a boundary-crossing lens, the article analyses the workplace arrangement, in which students’ learning across professional boundaries and their negotiations around a boundary object were prerequisites to coordinate their interprofessional knowledge and manage emerging challenges while being in charge of care on the ward.

PurposeClinical placement is an important formalised student activity for linking healthcare education and healthcare practices. The purpose of this study is to investigate the organising of clinical placements by examining conditions for collaboration between higher education and healthcare organisations.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on interviews with central actors at a university and two healthcare organisations with official duties of organising clinical placements.FindingsThe findings indicate that collaboration in the organising of clinical placements is a complex matter of interconnected actors in different organisational positions, at both strategic and operative levels. The university and the healthcare organisations approached the clinical placement with a shared commitment.Practical implicationsThe findings provide important guidance for improving collaboration in the organising of clinical placements. This may have an impact on how contextual conditions of the educational framing and daily healthcare practices are viewed and how the interdependency between the long-term strategic issues and the short-term needs of healthcare organisations is approached.Originality/valueThis research emphasises the need for careful consideration of the collaborative practices on an organisational level between higher education and healthcare organisations as different needs, motives and logics have to be considered.

This study investigates learning at an IT help desk in a multinational production company, a work practice that has not yet been given much research attention despite its importance in many areas of society. IT help desks heavily rely on different forms of documentation for sustaining their practice and for maintaining their communication and expertise as a team. In the study, we explore how the documentation in a case management software, which is a very salient tool by means of which IT help desks perform their work, is being reused to shape the quality of the performance of the team. Through video observations of locally arranged discussions about 46 cases we analyze, in detail, the material, discursive and interactional means by which daily documentation of work is re-visited for learning purposes.

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