Exploring Early Interprofessional Socialization Within the Health Professions: Setting the Stage for Collaborative Practice

Effective teamwork and collaboration between health professionals is essential to achieve better quality healthcare, a more productive health workforce and enhanced patient outcomes. Health professionals often struggle to understand the role of the various other disciplines in large part because they are educated separately. Interprofessional education (IPE), which involves having health professionals learn with, from and about one another, is a foundational strategy towards ensuring collaborative health professional teams. IPE initiatives usually take place within formal training programs. However, research has demonstrated that even prior to health professional education, during early stages of career choice and recruitment, individuals often learn to position the various health professions in opposition to one another which can impede collaboration. We currently lack an understanding of how experiences during career choice and early socialization influence future collaborative practice. This research seeks to understand how interprofessional collaboration can be enhanced through early socialization, during recruitment and career choice, before the various health professionals are 'siloed' into separate training programs. This research will use qualitative, narrative methods to explore the professional and career socialization experiences of five groups of health professional students (dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy) at Dalhousie University. The findings will be used to create social media and web-based career choice, recruitment and early professional socialization messages designed to promote interprofessional practice. Understandings derived from this study will be used to enhance early interprofessional socialization as a strategy to strengthen the health workforce, promote collaborative teamwork and improve care delivery and patient health outcomes.