During both my previous degree and my current medical training inter-professional learning modules have been undertaken in the first year of study.

On both occasions I was struck by the thought that the students I was talking to from the other professions didn’t really know what their professional roles and responsibilities were.

Then I realised, neither did I.

 In my opinion undertaking a module of inter-professional learning (IPL) without having a good understanding of the profession you are representing can be frustrating at best, but also potentially damaging to inter-professional relationships at its worst.

During my first degree my cohort were lucky enough to have spent a fair amount of time in practice observing clinicians by the time we had to undertake the dreaded IPL module. This put us at an advantage compared with students from the other allied health professions who had not yet been in practice. This disparity made discussions about patient pathways and professional roles particularly strained, as often I had little understanding of the scope of practice of their profession, and some of the other students thought paramedics just “drove the ambulance” and offered no other care to their patients! As you can imagine, this led to a good deal of animosity, on both sides.

 At the end of my undergraduate degree we completed another IPL module, this time with other students in the final year of their degrees. By this time, all of my cohort were registered with the Health Professions Council and the students from other disciplines were also about to become registered. We all had a good grasp of our individual professions and had worked in clinical settings, interacting with other professional groups and learning from them ‘on the job’.

In reflection I found this second module of IPL far more educational and informative than the first. More importantly than this, in my opinion, was the fact that the second module of IPL was not a competition of whose profession was best, it was instead what good inter-professional learning should be about;

Professionals from different disciplines working together to learn from each other and solve problems together.