There is accumulative evidence and successive government policy to suggest that the health and social care professions need to provide integrated services to the public. Interprofessional education is regarded as a solution to the problem and has developed from this demand. Educational initiatives of an interprofessional nature are now a regular occurrence. The role of the teacher in facilitating these programmes has been largely overlooked. The purpose of this thesis was to address this imbalance. The study adopted the illuminative evaluation paradigm to investigate the teachers' perceptions of interprofessional education and shared learning milieu. It took the form of three surveys. The first survey addressed the perceptions of the course leaders in centres for teacher education. The second survey involved new teachers, mentors and managers in colleges for nursing and midwifery education at that time. The third survey addressed interprofessional education from the perceptions of teachers of health and social care professions who were involved in IPE programmes in higher education. The central research question underlying the study was how do teachers view and implement IPE? Essential to this was the question are teachers prepared for their role in interprofessional education? Multiple methods were used to collect the data and both quantitative and qualitative methods were used in analysis. Non parametric statistics were applied to quantitative data. Computer assisted analysis was used for the qualitative data through a purpose built database using ACCESS software. The results showed that teachers or students did not have preparation for interprofessional education while the majority of teachers felt that they required it. The evidence suggested a lack of commitment at strategic level, and a lack of structuring and planning of resources to accommodate this type of education. Teachers were aware of the benefits interprofessional education could offer, but were sceptical as to the motives underlying it. In reality, interprofessional education was less than the proposed principles behind it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:544543 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Ni Mhaolrúnaigh, Siobhán |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/36423/ |
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