Deliberate socio-culture engineering as a key element of interprofessional simulation design: Interprofessional simulation design

Many elements contribute to the success of interprofessional learning. One being the creation of appropriate groups of learners, both in terms of the mix of participants and, also, in terms them sharing ownership of the learning task – labelling them as a team. Creating an environment where the team “succeeds” ensures it is well placed to deal with the subsequent simulated challenging situation, encompassing a high risk of failure with extreme consequences. Another element, is ensuring sufficient contact between learners for appropriate interprofessional interaction to occur. This contact can be overt and obvious to learners, such as occurring during structured learning tasks, or can be covert such as occurring during breaks where continued interactions are facilitated by timetabling and the physical environment. Optimising conversations between participants is also an important element for successful interprofessional learning. Requiring participants to fulfil well-defined, tightly structured roles promotes effective communication, as there is no choice but to interact, and conversations may thus occur, where otherwise would be unlikely. Further, creating diverse health care teams for simulation purposes that ultimately reflect real clinical practice – is a key element of interprofessional simulation design. In this presentation, we will describe the socio-cultural engineering strategies deliberately employed to optimise interactions and learning in our innovative interprofessional simulation. The design of the socio-cultural engineering is based on our knowledge of the science of education and practical experiences gained delivering this program to over 10,000 final year medical and nursing students during the past 10 years at Monash University. This interprofessional learning program is currently being evaluated using realist theory. Qualitative data from a realist evaluation, including expert opinion will be provided. Insights gained from student focus groups in relation to students’ experiences of working in interprofessional health care teams for the full day of simulation will be shared.