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Health professional education (HPE) has been affected significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic, due to a combination of disruption to healthcare systems, changes to workforce needs, the effects on tertiary education provision and a necessity to innovate. While a challenging time, these were also opportunities in disguise. There is evidence that HPE is historically slow to adapt at the best of times; COVID-19 was an unavoidable catalyst for change. As the world tries to adapt to 'COVID-19 normal' life, it is essential that those in HPE consider what a 'COVID-19 normal' response might be. The learnings noted in this paper draw on recent literature and aim to help health professional educators consider what we have learned from our experiences during the height of the pandemic and ways of advancing curricula, teaching and learning. While the learnings are drawn from the health professions, they likely have relevance to professional and higher education more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Organizational and university staff buy-in and advocacy are critical considerations in planning successful interprofessional education (IPE) initiatives in healthcare, such as interprofessional student-led clinics (SLCs). This study was designed with the purpose of gaining deeper insight into current views and perspectives of academic and professional staff at an Australian university, as a precursor to planning IPE and SLC activities.Methods: All academic and professional staff from within the School of Health Sciences were invited to participate in the study. In-depth-qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 staff to explore academic and professional staff perspectives on IPE and SLCs. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.Results: Findings are grouped within five themes that incorporate broad perspectives on the tensions and possibilities of IPE and establishment of SLCs: Academic and professional staff commitment; Better/smarter IPE; Student-led clinic potential; Vision and innovation; and Strategy and resourcing. The themes reflect the high value placed on IPE by academic and professional staff and incorporate innovative ideas on how to prepare students for a rapidly changing and evolving healthcare environment. A reticence towards standard models of university based SLCs was expressed.Conclusion: Academic and professional staff insights suggest university leaders need to develop a greater strategic focus on improving IPE. Effective engagement with staff is required to support IPE planning and implementation. If considering implementation of SLCs, contemporary fit-for-purpose models should be explored such as partnerships with primary healthcare providers, community wellness facilities, and hospital clinics rather than traditional university-based clinics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue: Preparing health professional students for practice matters and is an important objective of health professional education. But although health professional courses grow in number and continue to graduate entry-level practitioners annually, there are signs that health professional education is not quite hitting the "purpose" mark. Preparedness is a term encountered often in health professional education, but it is besieged with challenges. Those challenges relate to whether graduates are prepared for their future careers and how preparedness for practice is understood; understandings of preparedness influence what curriculum, teaching, and learning prepares graduates about and for. Evidence: There is a wealth of the literature that suggests that graduates are not prepared for practice or believe they are not. This literature tends to grow rather than diminish, with arguments about preparedness materializing time and again. Preparedness means different things to students, academics, and practitioners and this creates misunderstanding as well as lessening the construct's value to research, education, and practice. What it means to be prepared is in fact not a static construct but changes in response to the needs of individuals and communities and broader societal context. When preparedness is defined as competence in skills or knowledge, graduates will be ill equipped to operate in the chaotic, ambiguous times we now face as competencies tend to oversimplify and reduce the demands of practice. Implications: Preparedness is only one purpose that could be attached to the educational formation of university graduates. It is time we expand our thinking about what is valuable and necessary to learn in order to become health professionals equipped to address the health and social care problems now and to come. Furthermore, continuing to address the challenges of preparedness for practice in the same ways as we have done for decades will not result in change; new and different educational approaches are required to meaningfully reimagine health professional education. We need to value education as a scholarly field in its own right, as much as we do evidence-based healthcare. A concept that prompts us to think and act in these reinvigorated ways is stewardship, which I offer as an expansive way to think about the purposes and desired outcomes of health professional education. Stewardship is an idea that sustains and cares for the professions, and therefore is highly relevant to the preparation of healthcare practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care is central to many health professions, including physiotherapy. Different forms of care are enacted as part of being a caring professional. For example, a practitioner who provides good service to others and upholds standards while doing so is in-grained in education for professional formation. However, there are other topics and aspects of care that are not as well attended to, and that is care for the future of the profession. This too is an aspect of care, and it is an urgent objective in an era where societies and healthcare are changing at rapid rates. In this paper, I argue that Golde and Walker's (2006) idea of stewardship can help health professionals think about this often overlooked aspect of care. Stewardship adds a perspective that is centered on a deep authentic care for and responsibility towards the ongoing relevance of the profession. Stewardship keeps the question of what the profession is, and what a professional does, alive as part of its present and future practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students as partners is a movement which is gaining momentum in higher education, yet disciplinary perspectives are underexplored. Using a qualitative synthesis approach informed by Major and Savin-Baden (2010), we systematically investigated how health professional education has taken up the practice of working in partnership with students. Fifty-five publications were identified in our search from 2011 to -mid 2018. The majority of literature came from North America and medicine was the most frequently represented health profession. Our three stage analysis identified five key themes: (1) framing (i.e. ethos) of the partnership; (2) drivers for partnership; (3) sustainability; (4) inclusion of student voice; and (5) understanding of partnership and its benefits and challenges. Health professional educators are well equipped to enact partnership opportunities due to their clinical skills in person-centred care. However to gain the most from student-staff partnerships, health professional education would benefit from greater awareness of the field's theoretical understandings of partnership and its key principles of reciprocity, respect and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touch is an integral part of human life. Consequently, touching and being touched are also fundamental to healthcare practice. Despite a significant literature on touch, it is rarely conceptualized or discussed in terms of the student journey from layperson to practitioner. We chose to explore professional touch using the threshold concepts framework (TCF), which provides a theoretical model for exploring the way in which learners encounter, engage with and understand fundamental concepts in a discipline. This qualitative research synthesis (QRS) describes the use of the TCF to identify key issues involved in developing and using professional touch. Through a cross-professional analysis and synthesis of recent international literature, we aimed to identify key characteristics of the transitional journey for professional touch. Three orders of analysis were applied, employing a methodology described by Major and Savin-Baden (An introduction to qualitative research synthesis: managing the information explosion in social science research, Routledge, London, 2010). Following identification of threshold characteristics in the overall sample of articles, second order analysis revealed the nuances of professional touch associated with the characteristics. The final synthesis led to identification of five themes: touch as dialogue; being changed by touch; multiple boundaries of touch; multiple meanings of touch and influences on touch. Whilst providing support for some assertions within the literature, this QRS also offers new insights into the complexity of professional touch. Given the paucity of explicit learning and reflection around professional touch in training programmes of health professionals, the TCF reveals ways in which professional preparation might be improved to promote understanding of the role and impact of touch in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we aim to add to the existing literature on practice-based education. First, we will present a form of situated learning, which involved piloting a new teaching and learning relationship between the university and healthcare setting. Second, we will examine how students made sense of this perspective of practice. Using a phenomenologically oriented approach, this pilot study explored the experiences of entry-level physiotherapy students learning in a classroom environment, facilitated by clinicians, and located on a healthcare partner’s site. Twenty students completed two concurrent, theoretically oriented subjects that did not involve traditional clinical practicum experience. Two individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with students. Data was thematically analysed using an inductive approach. Three inter-related themes emerged. First, meaning-making is enhanced by the relevance and authenticity afforded by immersion in a practice-oriented classroom environment where clinicians facilitate learning. Second, learning from those ‘in practice’ challenges students’ professional and academic accountability. Finally, new educational infrastructures influenced students’ agency in unanticipated ways. This work highlights that students valued contextual learning. While meaning-making was enhanced by the development of key new relationships with others and the environment, these relationships also influenced student agency. Recommendations for health professional curricula are discussed, and include: capitalising on learning with peers, bringing the hidden curriculum into view, and creating opportunities for students to navigate uncertainty and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO-ICF) is a comprehensive and highly adaptable framework that provides a universal language and shared health concepts to articulate human functioning across the lifespan and from individual to population health settings. It provides a global, biopsychosocial, and holistic structure for conceptualising the human experience of health and health service provision. Consequently, the ICF framework offers hope for a universal map for health service providers that bridges professional, cultural, economic, and geographical variations. While the use of the ICF is typically mandated by health professions accreditation bodies, integration of the ICF in medical and health professional education programmes has been slow. In addition, its potential for scaffolding interprofessional education for collaborative practice has not been maximised. In this Perspective paper, we draw on our extensive experience in developing curricula and teaching within a range of health professions programmes (medicine, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, and speech-language pathology) to provide advice on conceptual, theoretical, and practical dimensions of embedding the ICF framework within curricula to support interprofessional education and collaborative practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]