Interprofessional undergraduate clinical learning: results from a three year project in a Danish Interprofessional Training Unit.

On entering higher education students become professionally socialized, and parallel with this, stereotyping takes place, students developing a more positive assessment of their own roles than those of other professions. This difference between the view of their own and other professions can contribute to creating cognitive and social boundaries between professions that hinder sharing of knowledge, which can result in poor cooperation. Interprofessional training can provide students with good clinical expertise in their own profession as well as teach them about other professions encouraging more positive attitudes between the professions. This project has taken place from 2004 to 2007 in a Danish Interprofessional Training Unit manned with students from the professions occupational therapy, physiotherapy, medicine and nursing. As part of an evaluation of the project, four focus group interviews and two in-depth interviews were analysed using the technique of Systematic Text Condensation. Results show that the goals of the Interprofessional Training Unit were fulfilled because the students learned interprofessional teamwork, strengthened their own professional role and worked together in an organization for the benefit of the patient. All this took place in a secure learning environment in which new methods of coordinating and integrating clinical and theoretical interprofessional learning were developed and tested.