Interprofessional/multiprofessional health professions education: designing an efficient search to scope the literature of this exploding field

Abstract

Background and objective : With the advent of an interprofessional approach to delivering health care in today's health care systems, should health care professionals be educated together? Supported by policy-making circles worldwide, interprofessional education is accumulating a research literature at an exponential rate. Using one-word search terms in the medline query box for scoping this body of literature, we obtained an unmanageable number of articles (342 338 in all fields). The objective of our study was to outline an efficient specific query. Methods : We created 1072 phrasal search terms consisting of a prefix, an adjective and a noun. Of those, 66 were prolific for the whole indexed period (1950 -2006). Results : Only 2510 citations have the search term in all medline fields; of those 2049 were in title/abstract and 652 in title alone. From the 1950s, the citations were published at a slow rate, but the rate then exploded during the decade 1995 to 2006. The combination of prefixes 'inter' and 'multi' with the adjectives 'professional', 'disciplinary' and 'shared', and the nouns 'education', 'learning' and 'training' may retrieve almost all the relevant citations, while the terms 'collaborative' and 'common' may retrieve mainly irrelevant ones. The adjective 'cohesive' and nouns 'practice' and 'role' should be also considered. Conclusion : Phrasal search terms highly increased the relevance of medlineretrieved citations.

Evidence of successful interprofessional education programs—models, barriers, facilitators and success: a systematic review of European studies

“…Classification and retrieval of studies could pose a concern when it comes to searching. Nevertheless, Ioannis and Dimoliatis (2007), has demonstrated that the number of studies in this field is exploding. The authors demonstrate that in the databases the prefix "inter*" occurs if included in the algorithm is a better than the "multi*" predictor of the number of citations that will be retrieved, especially if it is included in the title alone.…”

Discussing teamwork in health care: from interprofessional collaboration to coordination and cooperation

“…This proposition makes sense given that scholars have used vague concepts and terms to refer to multiple types of interactions in health care (Barr, ). Furthermore, adopting more specific terms to refer to different types of interactions in health care would make it easier to identify relevant literature and to design policies and educational programmes that address a given problem (Dimoliatis & Roff, ).…”

“…This could lead to policies and educational interventions that target more achievable forms of teamwork. It would also make it easier for researchers to find literature that is relevant to the type of interaction that they are interested in (Dimoliatis & Roff, ).…”

Sri Lankan Undergraduate Healthcare Student’s Perceptions of Interprofessional Learning: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…According to numerous studies, the first important step in implementing IPCP (in full?) within a healthcare organization is to provide "Patient centered care", which means to provide care in an environment that gives patients high quality care according to his/ her needs [7,8]. Due to its considerable importance in the health sector, Interprofessional collaboration is starting to be taught to healthcare students under the name of inter-professional education (IPE).…”