INPRO Design Thinking Workshops of the St.Pölten UAS – Planning together with Experts
Copyright FH St. Pölten / Ursula Hemetek
The focus of the first week was on the design process of an interprofessional and international teaching and learning intervention. The first workshops started out by examining the patients’ perspectives and needs through intensive collaborative exchange.
On this basis, the participants worked out the competencies that students, teachers and practitioners need to have, and how this is or could be reflected in the training of health professionals. In the third workshop, the team worked specifically on potential course designs that adopt not only an interprofessional perspective but also an international one.
In this context, the international experts address questions such as: how much interprofessional collaboration is possible in an international team of students? How much mono-professional exchange between students of different nationalities is necessary for this type of teaching and learning intervention? How can clients benefit from international interprofessional student work? And how can the ICF support international interprofessional exchange?
In the second week, the focus was on the collaboration with practice partners / rehabilitation centres and clients within the framework of interprofessional teaching and learning interventions. Based on the perspective of teachers and the needs of practitioners who act as lecturers, it was worked out through intensive collaboration and discussion which competencies these persons need to have and how students can be assisted in further developing these competencies in themselves.
The insights from this workshop are deliberately designed in the form of a bottom-up brainstorming to complement the top-down approach of the consortium, which entails reviews on interprofessional competence profiles, and the results of a survey on existing IPE examples.
Outlook:
A total of eight Design Thinking Workshops are planned. After a short summer break, the participants will be back to work on concrete prototypes in the autumn. In December 2021, four teaching and learning interventions with different focus areas will be carried out in the form of pre-pilot interventions at the St. Pölten UAS:
- PROMISE (Promoting Interprofessional Student Experience in Health Sciences) is organised by the Department of Social Sciences as an interprofessional learning and teaching project which is supposed to be integrated into the new Curriculum 2020 as a fixed component from the year 2022. After its very successful start last year, PROMISE currently takes place for the second time already.
- INPRO (Interprofessionalism in Action!) International is designed as an extension to PROMISE. This learning intervention is about interprofessional collaboration, also with international students. However, none of the participants need to travel in order to participate as the interprofessional collaboration is planned in an online format. The teaching takes place in English with students and teachers from our partner universities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Finland.
- INPRO Praxis: in this teaching and learning intervention, the participants work with real persons (pupils of the secondary school NMS Drosendorf who are invited to class) to practice putting the client at the centre of interprofessional communication.
- INPRO Praxis Teamwork: at the same time, our practice partner Moorheilbad Harbach develops the concept of a prototypical course that allows students to participate in a simulated interprofessional team meeting which is recorded for long-term use.
We would like to thank all participants and co-developers for their commitment, time and contributions!