Apprendre à collaborer en équipe interprofessionnelle et à développer les compétences de la pratique collaborative et de partenariat patient en santé et services sociaux dans un cours universitaire hybride à l’ère du numérique

Collaboration among health professionals is required to contend with population aging, the prevalence of chronic illnesses, and staff shortages in certain health professions (WHO, 2010). As well, to foster optimal collaboration and provide good quality of care, some teams are now adopting a patient partnership approach in which the patient’s experiential knowledge of living with illness is valued as part of the interprofessional collaboration and the patient is integrated into the healthcare team. The Université de Montréal (UdeM) offers a program in interprofessional collaboration education (IPE) geared towards teaching the competencies required for collaborative practice in both health sciences and psychosocial sciences in partnership with patients. The IPE is confronted with a variety of challenges related to logistics, communication, and the compartmentalization of professions, among others. To overcome these obstacles, the UdeM has turned to digital technology to help interprofessional teams of students to collaborate online and in person. This study focused on describing how students in interprofessional teams collaborate in the hybrid course entitled Health Sciences Collaboration in Partnership with Patients, offered by the UdeM. We describe how students collaborate online and in the classroom, and we identify the competencies in the competency framework used. Our study proposes a conceptual framework based on the IPE’s hybrid (online and in person) collaborative learning model, which we constructed using: 1) the model of Chiocchio, Grenier, O’Neill, Savaria, and Willms (2012), to describe how the student teams collaborate and used dimensions of collaboration (communication, synchronisation, explicit and implicit coordination) ; 2) the competency framework for collaborative practice and patient partnership in health and social services (Direction collaboration et partenariat patient [DCPP] and Comité interfacultaire opérationnel de formation à la collaboration, l’Université de Montréal [CIO-UdeM], 2016); and 3) the interprofessional work typology of Xyrichis, Reeves, and Zwarenstein (2018). Our study used a convergent mixed methodology. We conducted this study with a cohort of 1,435 second-year undergraduate students in course CSS2900 coming from 13 20 different UdeM programs. This course is divided in three parts: 1) online training 2) intra- program activity, 3) interprofessional workshop coanimated by a health professional and patient-partner facilitator in classroom. First, we analyzed the online collaboration journal (OCJ) of 12 interprofessional student teams (n = 60). Second, we distributed a questionnaire on Collaboration in Interprofessional Teams to the entire cohort at the end of the course, to which 321 participants responded. The results show that the majority of study participants used the dimensions of collaboration in a similar manner online and in person. Communication and coordination were dependent on synchronization when collaboration occurred online. The use of both social media and an online collaborative writing tool fostered collaboration in hybrid mode. In the classroom, the patient-partner co-facilitator supported the teams as they reviewed their learning (coordination) and, in this way, developed the competencies of the framework for course CSS2900. Under the hybrid study model, the teams were able to collaborate over an extended period, similar to a flipped classroom approach (Figure 29). This fostered development of the framework competencies (DCPP and CIO-UdeM) and helped break down professional boundaries. The learning contexts in which effective competency practices were mobilized appeared analogous to the interprofessional networking and consultative collaboration categories in the typology of Xyrichis et al. (2018).

Keyphrases: partenariat patient, IPE, technologies, interprofessional education, interprofessional collaborative practice, patient partnership, higher education, competencies, health and social sciences, Flipped classroom, collaborative learning, digital native, online collaborative writing, social media