International Journal of Healthcare Simulation

Background:

A comprehensive literature review was performed to critically evaluate the benefits and challenges of inter-professional education (IPE) in the Emergency Department (ED) and within in situ simulation.

Method:

A literature review was carried out for manuscripts within my institution’s high-quality online library, as part of a post-graduate assignment. Search terms included keywords: ‘interprofessional education’, ‘interprofessional teams’, ‘simulation’, ‘emergency medicine’, and ‘healthcare’. A total of 23 peer-reviewed manuscripts were identified spanning a publication range of 22 years (1998 to 2020). Analysis of the literature resulted in the identification of 7 subject headings as most relevant to IPE. These subject headings were ‘patient safety’, ‘patient flow’, ‘learning outcomes’, ‘professional identities’, ‘organization’, ‘technology enhanced learning’ and ‘faculty’.

Findings:

EDs are demanding ^[1], resource limited ^[2] and inter-professional (IP) areas, and as a result, anything leading to a reduction in errors and improvement of team working must be welcomed. IPE has been shown to improve both of these key factors; however, IPE within a busy ED is fraught with challenges. These include shift patterns, clinician ‘buy-in’, and not least physical space in a social distancing world. Faculty must consider shared learning outcomes for all professions, which is recognized as being hard to achieve ^[3], ensuring that the professions are learning ‘with, from and about’ ^[4], to prevent the step over to multi-professional education. To do this, we must understand each other’s professional identities to improve our team working and by having IP faculty we can represent these identities and use a ‘co-tutoring’ approach [ref. 3, p.89].

Implications for practice:

IPE occurs frequently in in situ simulation, but how can each profession feel like they have equal learning outcomes when the faculty is uniprofessional? By having inter-professional faculty some of the challenges of delivering effective IPE, for all, are easier to overcome. In situ simulation should be inherently IPE but with faculty often uniprofessional we may be creating our own barriers to true inclusivity. There is no doubt that IPE simulation is beneficial when delivered well; however, IP facilitation is currently an area underexplored in the literature.