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Background: Integration of clinical medicine and other subjects has laid more emphasis on the cultivation of high-quality medical talents, with the increasing demand for interprofessional education (IPE). IPE has been promoted by a number of universities to create and sustain authentic IPE activities, with which students can engage. Although IPE has achieved certain results, there are still many problems. Many studies focused on the perspective of educators without understanding the essential needs and experience of students. This study intends to focus on the implementation of IPE from the perspective of medical students. Purpose: To describe the interprofessional experiences of medical students and provide a reference for the development of interprofessional education programs for medical students. Methods: A descriptive qualitative study was conducted in 2023, using purposive sampling to select medical students who had interprofessional learning experiences for semi-structured interviews. The study used a phenomenological approach and Colaizzi’s phenomenological method for analyzing and summarizing the interprofessional experiences and perceptions to extract themes. Results: The interprofessional experiences of medical students were distilled into five themes: “cognition and attitude”, “practice and collaboration”, “motivation and drive”, “difficulty and challenge”, and “expectation and vision”. Students reported their experience and found interprofessional learning beneficial for broadening their horizon and building harmonious healthcare teams. Based on the experience of interprofessional learning, students also put forward expectations and ideas for IPE especially for medical students. Conclusion: Each institution should establish a complete interprofessional education system in accordance with the professional education system of students, to achieve interprofessional education for medical students that adapts to the national conditions of China, and to better improve the overall quality of future medical service teams, to achieve patient-centered high-quality care experience. Trial registration: Not applicable. © The Author(s) 2024.

Objective. ‘Placement poverty’ refers to the financial burdens imposed upon students by the completion of mandatory professional placement. We aimed to identify the financial implications of mandatory professional placements on student wellbeing. Methods. A cross-sectional online survey (August 2023 to January 2024) completed during students’ most recent professional placement in the final year of their degree. Eligible participants were health or teaching students studying at Australian and New Zealand universities in degrees requiring mandatory professional placement. Questions included total and accommodation costs, financial support, impact of finances on placement preferences, presence of food insecurity, and implications for student wellbeing. Results. Participants (n = 530) were mostly health professional (65%) students (median, 25; interquartile range (IQR), 22–30 years, 95.3% domestic, 88.3% full time, 2.0% New Zealand). Health students had higher total costs (in Australian dollars) for the recent placement ($1500; IQR, 600–3453) compared to teaching students ($1200; IQR, 600–2757) (P = 0.02), likely due to longer placement duration (6 weeks for health students). A higher proportion of health students required financial support (P = 0.0001). Placement preferences were always or sometimes (63.8%) determined by cost rather than learning opportunity. Food insecurity was experienced by most students (70.2%) (10.4% marginal, 32.1% moderate, 27.7% severe), with no difference by degree type. Thematic analysis identified themes of burnout, emotional distress, inability to focus on learning, postponing care of oneself, urgent need for financial support, unanticipated family and other circumstances, and worsened societal inequity. Conclusions. Our study identified widespread financial difficulty in students undertaking placement that adversely impacted personal wellbeing. Strategies are needed to support wellbeing and ameliorate the financial burden. © 2025 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of AHHA.

Background: The demand for physiotherapy clinical placements is rising which requires innovative approaches and an understanding of clinical placement models. Objective: To determine physiotherapy student contribution to direct patient care activity during a collaborative clinical placement model. Secondary aims determined the impact of clinical area and clinical educator to student (CE:student) ratio and if a group of students could reach equivalent direct patient care activity of a junior or senior physiotherapist. Method: Physiotherapy student, and junior and senior physiotherapist occasions of service (OOS) were collected from five Queensland Public Health Sector hospital information management systems from four physiotherapy clinical areas (i.e. cardiorespiratory, musculoskeletal, neurorehabilitation, and orthopedics). Number of days of clinical activity was recorded to provide average OOS/day. Results: Across a 5-week clinical placement a group of physiotherapy students in a collaborative clinical placement model provided on average 10.6 OOS/day (95%CI 10.1–11.2). In three (75%) clinical areas, a group of students participating in higher CE:student ratios produced more OOS/day. Clinical area and CE:student ratio predicted 39% of the variance in student average OOS/day. On average a group of students reached the equivalent direct patient care activity of a junior and senior physiotherapist by week two of a 5-week clinical placement. Conclusion: Physiotherapy students in a collaborative clinical placement model met or exceeded the direct patient care activity of a physiotherapist, irrespective of clinical area and CE:student ratio. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Autistic adults are inadequately supported in the workplace. This study sought a definition of ‘reasonable’ and explored facilitators and barriers to employers making reasonable adjustments. 98 employers and employees across a UK city completed a survey; 15% identified as being autistic. Qualitative data were analysed using framework analysis. Reasonable adjustments were defined as having a positive impact on autistic employees’ wellbeing and work outputs without being detrimental to non-autistic employees or the organisation; they were low cost and easily implemented. Recommendations were for autism awareness training, low-stimulus work spaces, clear instructions and flexible working hours. A definition of reasonable is added to the literature, with suggestions of where to invest support efforts. Recommendations mostly apply to the education sector. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Healthcare values are fairly ubiquitous across the globe, focusing on caring and respect, patient health, excellence in care delivery, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Many individual pharmacists embrace these core values. However, their ability to honor these values is significantly determined by the nature of the system in which they work. The paper starts by presenting the prevailing pharmacist workforce model, the ‘Atomistic’ Model, in Scotland, in which core roles are typically separated into hierarchically disaggregated jobs focused on one professional ‘pillar’: Clinician/Practice Provider; Educator; Leader/Manager; and Researcher. This skills-segregation yields a workforce of individuals working in isolation rather than collaborating, lacking a shared purpose. Key strategic flaws include suboptimal responsiveness to population needs, inconsistency/inequity of care, erosion of professional agency, and lower job satisfaction. It is conjectured that this results from a lack of congruence between values, professional ethos, and organizational structure. ‘Atomism’ culminates in a syndrome of widespread professional-level cognitive dissonance. The paper contrasts this with an emerging workforce vision, the Collaborative Care Model. This new model defines a systems-first-approach, built on the principle that all jobs must include all four professional ‘pillars’. Vertical skills integration, involving education and task sharing, supports sustainability and succession planning. Horizontal skills integration (across practice, leadership/management, education, and research) is included to improve responsiveness to population need and individual professional agency. The working conditions, supportive ethos, and career structure needed to make the model work are described. Moral and workforce theory are used to justify why the model may be more effective for population health, delivering greater job satisfaction for individuals and ultimately helping systematically realize healthcare values. Finally, the paper sketches the first steps needed to implement the model at the national level, starting with the operationalization of new multi-‘pillar’ professional curricula across the career spectrum. Potential challenges also are discussed. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

This paper investigates how the specificity of the field of study is related to the quality of school-to-work transitions, and whether this relation is moderated by the level of education and the cyclical sensitivity of the field of study. We apply a processual approach and produce a typology of school-to-work transitions based on labor market position and income. This is done with multichannel sequence analysis on register data on school-leavers in the Netherland for the 2009–2010 cohort (N = 182,057). The results confirm that specificity is positively related to the quality of school-to-work transitions in terms of employment and income security. This however mostly holds for the highest levels of upper-secondary vocational education (ISCED 354), and much less for the lower levels of upper-secondary vocational education and tertiary education. In contrast to our expectations, specificity was more often related to positive career outcomes for cyclically sensitive fields of study. © 2022

Purpose: Competencies for educators of healthcare professionals are important for demonstrating accountability, defining roles and responsibilities, structuring activities for training and development, defining standards, quality assurance, performance reviews, career development, and promoting the professionalisation of teaching. The frameworks and domains of educator competencies have not previously been reviewed or systematically described. Through this integrative review, the authors sought to identify an inclusive structure for competency domains that may be applied to educators. Methods: Keywords were identified in a pilot search, followed by a multi-database search strategy of records published from 2000 to January 2020 with subsequent backward and forward reference searches. We included all record types that listed or described educator competency domains in medical, nursing and health sciences education. We excluded records that described ‘ideal traits’ or ‘characteristics of good teachers/educators,’ presented competencies as part of a larger curricular framework, and teaching assessment tool content. Results: The multi-database search retrieved 2942 initial citations. From a full-text review of 301 records, 67 were identified as describing educator competency domains eligible for analysis. Documents contained a median of six domains (interquartile range = 5–7) and 14.9% incorporated at least one overarching element across their domains. Following an inductive thematic analysis, six distinct domains of educator competence were identified: Teaching and facilitating learning; Designing and planning learning; Assessment of learning; Educational research and scholarship; Educational leadership and management; Educational environment, quality, and safety. The two latter domains contained sub-themes that were able to be further categorised. Documents and frameworks were described for a wide variety of health and allied health disciplines. Conclusion: Distinct educator competency domains were identified in this analysis, applicable across a range of healthcare disciplines. Along with the description of design elements, these provide a guide for the development and evaluation of educator competency frameworks. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Background: Continuing professional education (CPE) is important for maintaining the competencies of nurses. The evaluation of training needs is necessary for well-organized CPE programs. Objectives: To obtain a deeper understanding of the past experiences and future expectations of CPE among nurses in Chinese military hospitals in order to provide empirical support for planning effective CPE programs. Design: We implemented a two-phase procedure to investigate the experiences and expectations of CPE. Settings: Twenty one hospitals across China. Participants: 382 nurses in quantitative study, and 20 nurses in qualitative study. Methods: Self-designed questionnaire was used to quantitatively measure past experiences, willingness to participate, and future expectations of CPE via a cross-sectional study. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to explore the characteristics of CPE activities among military nurses. Results: A total of 293 (76.7 %) participants had experience with CPE in the past, and 362 (94.8 %) were willing to take CPE in the future. The top five training items they wanted to learn about in the future were combat casualty care, emergency and critical care, military skills, trauma care in an austere environment, and specialist nursing. We identified the following 5 themes in the qualitative data: military missions, military training content, military medicine training content, training methods, and professional development paths. Conclusions: Nursing administrators and educators should consider designing hierarchical, categorized CPE programs to meet the needs of self-development and professional growth among nurses. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Virtual Reality (VR)-based training has gained attention from the scientific community in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry as a cost-effective and safe method that eliminates the safety risks that may impose on workers during the training compared to traditional training methods (e.g., in-person hands-on training, apprenticeship). Although researchers have developed VR-based training for construction workers, some have recruited students rather than workers to understand the effect of their VR-based training. However, students are different from construction workers in many ways, which can threaten the validity of such studies. Hence, research is needed to investigate the extent to which the findings of a VR-based training study are contingent on whether students or construction workers were used as the study sample. This paper strives to compare the effectiveness of VR-based training on university students’ and construction workers’ knowledge acquisition, trust in the robot, and robot operation self-efficacy in remote operation of a construction robot. Twenty-five construction workers and twenty-five graduate construction engineering students were recruited to complete a VR-based training for remote operating a demolition robot. We used quantitative analyses to answer our research questions. Our study shows that the results are dependent on the target sample in that students gained more knowledge, whereas construction workers gained more trust in the robot and more self-efficacy in robot operation. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of VR-based training on students may not necessarily associate with its effectiveness on construction workers. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Purpose: To evaluate Australian early-career general practitioners’ perceptions of the utility of their prior vocational training in preparing them for independent specialist practice. We hypothesised that in-practice teaching would be perceived as more useful than formal education delivered by Regional Training Organisations (RTOs). Methods and materials: A cross-sectional questionnaire-based study of early-career general practitioners (RTO ‘alumni’). The outcomes were Likert scale ratings of alumni’s perceived impact of RTO education versus in-practice training on their preparedness for independent practice. Ratings were compared using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Multivariable linear regression was used to establish alumni characteristics associated with perceptions of utility of in-practice versus RTO-delivered education. Results: Three hundred and fifty-four alumni responded (response rate 28%). In-practice training was rated statistically significantly higher than RTO education for minor procedural skills, teaching skills, professional responsibilities, tolerating clinical uncertainty, and preparing for managing child and adolescent health, aged care, chronic disease, multi-morbidity and mental health. RTO education rated higher than in-practice training for practising evidence-based medicine and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. For a number of further areas, there was no statistically significant difference in alumni ratings of utility. Conclusions: In-practice or RTO-led teaching was perceived as more useful for some components of independent practice, whilst for others there was no significant difference. The findings support recognition of the individual educational components of a blended education/training structure. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.