Within the healthcare systems that exist today, it is expected that nurses are not only professional in their field, but are also experienced in collaborating with other disciplines (Williams, Merrill, Heise, & Novilla, 2014). Although inter-professional education opportunities frequently exist for students in various health care professions, nursing students rarely have opportunities to interact with students outside of healthcare-related professions. Choi and Pak (2006) have defined inter-professional education as “an integrative and reciprocally interactive approach that actualizes a synthesis of diverse disciplinary perspectives leading to a new level of thinking about ... a topic or even a new discipline” (Fawcett, 2013, p. 376). The university setting provides unique and valuable opportunities for nursing students to collaborate with other disciplines that have been historically unrelated to healthcare. When addressing complex problems, it is very difficult to obtain holistic solutions by only using one perspective. Inter-professional education supports the development of students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes, promotes collaboration between disciplines through an interactive process and collective perspectives, and facilitates attainment of goals that are incapable of being achieved individually within a single discipline (Furr, Lane, Serafica, & Hodge, 2015). The key is finding partners who are empathetic of the situation and capable of realizing solutions. Nurses are experts at determining solutions to address the day to day issues occurring in their patient environment, whereas designers are adept at translating these ideas into visions and actual products that can be implemented into the clinical work stream. Design thinking methodology opposes the traditional scientific method approach to emphasize the development of process or products with the end user in mind, and is an indispensable method for learning and applying human-centered design (Beaird, Geist, & Lewis, 2018). The goal of this inter-professional collaboration is to create effective solutions to optimize the use of resources and maximize outcomes.
To find unlikely collaborators, you must leave your desk and put yourself in an uncomfortable position to meet new people. Participating in events such as meet ups, attending lectures by non-discipline speakers, or volunteering to serve on multidisciplinary committees provide opportunities to interact with others who have the same goals, but arrive in a different way. Our collaboration started unintentionally thought an aging collaboration at our university. After listening to a lecture provided by a nurse, it was obvious that design had much more in common with nursing than physicians. From the beginning of that relationship, faculty from a school of design joined together with nursing educators on teaching and research initiatives in which course outcomes formed our research around collaborative teaching and exponentially higher project outcomes.
While this all seems to be a smooth transition, it is nothing but. Along the way, obstacles presented at every corner: scheduling, team conflicts, administrative conflicts. During the organization process, there needs to be flexibility in course scheduling and content refinement. During the planning process, it is extremely important that everyone knows what the goals of the class are from the highest level down to the student. Most importantly, the student must thoroughly understand the daily plan, as well as the team’s mission and how everyone team member will be contributing to the success of the project. Without this, there is a knowledge void and cynicism can appear around who is doing what and why this is important.
To counter this, throughout the course each week, joint informative lectures are conducted that identify what nursing students and design students are doing and why it is important. Both the nursing and design faculty lead a discussion about how the work one discipline conducts is bolstering the other, reminding students that at the end of the course, we will have a comprehensive solution.
In our collaborative course, we strive for actionable results. We develop products, services, and systems that address our stakeholder needs. The design students are well versed in product, graphic and fashion design and nursing students in the clinical aspects of the problems we are trying to solve, along with identifying the populations that are most vulnerable.
To obtain these solutions, we use an iterative product development process that allows all students to be collaborative when needed and focus on what they are good at when needed. The students develop products and product scenarios that can be tested and validated to ensure we are moving in the correct direction. This process has proven to be very effective for correctly solving problems and advancing solutions to the next level. Participation in this course has promoted experiential learning within each of the students. The process of experiential learning allows the learner to integrate new learning into old constructs, and prepares students to be knowledgeable, to apply their knowledge, to perform critical analysis of their work, and to discover how to become a lifelong learner (Gray & Christov, 2017). When individuals from different backgrounds and disciplines join together to create new possibilities that neither could have envisioned alone, innovation flourishes (Ulrich & Crider, 2017).
In this presentation, participants will hear from both the design and nursing faculty regarding the development of a collaborative course, obstacles encountered, and selected teaching strategies that are useful in engaging students in a cross-disciplinary course. Course outcomes including successful projects that emerged from this course will be shared.