Health Professional Socialization from Education to Practice: A Longitudinal Study

Effective teamwork and collaboration among health professionals is a well-recognized strategy toward enhancing care delivery and patient outcomes. However, there are a myriad of challenges in creating collaborative teams, including overlapping scopes of practice and health professionals' lack of understanding of each other's roles. Interprofessional education (IPE), where health professionals learn about, from, and with each other, is a key strategy towards ensuring collaborative teams. Professional socialization, the process of forming a professional identity and knowing the essence of a professional role, occurs both pre-entry and during formal training. Emerging evidence suggests that the socialization of health professionals can impact their future as collaborative practitioners. Yet, there is a gap in our understanding of best practices in relation to IPE, including how professional socialization impacts perceptions, expectations and practices of collaboration across health professions. We also know little about health professional students' socialization as it occurs over time. This research will undertake a longitudinal, qualitative exploration of professional socialization among students in dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and physiotherapy programs. This research builds upon a current CIHR-funded study (2014-2018, led by the PI), which explores early professional socialization (pre-entry and first year of training), to examine how professional socialization and IPE occurs throughout the entirety of the students' training through to the first year in practice. Findings will be used to inform the development of IPE curriculum and other strategies designed to enhance collaborative practice within the future health workforce. Knowledge from this research will be used to enhance interprofessional socialization and prepare future health professionals to identify as strong team players and ultimately improve health care delivery and patient outcomes.