Teamwork has become an important goal of contemporary healthcare. Therefore, one of the objectives of educating health professionals is to impart teamwork skills. While teamwork skills have become widely acknowledged as important for health sciences education (HSE), teamwork pedagogy within the ambit of interprofessional education within HSE is contested in the literature. The need to trouble the meaning of concepts within the interprofessional field to understand its nature and process in different contexts has been highlighted and remains an area in which further research is needed. Understanding the point of view of students can help educators, curriculum planners and evaluators make optimal use of their opportunities and resources within HSE. Thus, the present study sought to explore students' perceptions and experiences of teamwork within a HSE context with a view to contributing to this resource base. Implicit in the study context is the occurrence of first year health sciences students coming into contact with each other in a mixed professions course “Becoming a health professional” (BHP). A theory about social interaction, contact theory, postulates that when individuals from different groups have opportunities to come together under certain conditions, positive social outcomes may result. On the contrary, contact between distinct groups could also bring about adverse effects. In this study different groups referred to students registered for different health professional degree programmes. Based on the proviso that teamwork can be associated with positive, functional interactions between people, which of contact theory's suppositions were experienced by the students in this study was explored. Since teamwork is innately a social activity which is experienced in relation to others, one of the assumptions underpinning this study was that students' perspectives of teamwork may be co-constructed. Thus, the study was positioned within an interpretivist paradigm in which reality is subjective but also co-constructed by individuals, including participants and researchers. Using a qualitative design, this exploratory study offers insight into first year students' perspectives of teamwork within the undergraduate mixed professions course BHP. The primary data production method was focus group discussion and data were evaluated using thematic analysis. The thematic analysis yielded three broad themes: the purpose of teamwork in BHP; the persons involved in teamwork; and the process of teamwork in BHP. The findings of this study revealed that students had a comprehensive perception of what teamwork entails in their educational context, although their experiences of teamwork varied. These perspectives have been linked in concrete ways to the literature reviewed in this study and its theoretical framework. Thus, the findings were used to generate a heuristic for teamwork learning for health sciences students. The impact of this study is that students' perspectives of teamwork may be useful to the future design and delivery of entry level interprofessional courses aiming to instil teamwork skills. The underlying rhetoric of this thesis is that students are capable of contributing to their own learning, and the present findings manifested in one such contribution, the development of a pedagogical tool for teamwork.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/32727 |
| Date | 27 January 2021 |
| Creators | Hendricks, Adibah |
| Contributors | Hartman, Nadia |
| Publisher | Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Health Sciences Education |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MPhil |
| Format | application/pdf |
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