Preparing Medical and Nursing Students for Interprofessional Feedback Dialogues

BACKGROUND: In healthcare education, preparing students for interprofessional feedback dialogues is vital. However, guidance regarding developing interprofessional feedback training programs is sparse. In response to this gap, the Westerveld framework, which offers principles for interprofessional feedback dialogue, was developed. APPROACH: Using the Westerveld framework, we developed and implemented an interprofessional feedback intervention for 4(th)-year nursing and 5(th)-year medical students. It encompasses two half-day workshops comprising small group sessions, interactive lectures, and a goal-setting assignment for the rotations. This paper describes the intervention and reflects on students’ self-reported goals, as learning outcomes, to inform future interprofessional feedback dialogue education. OUTCOMES: To understand student’s learning outcomes, we coded the content and specificity of 288 responses to the goal-setting assignment. Students indicated they mainly aimed to improve their feedback actionability, but contrastingly set – largely unspecific – goals, addressing the initiation of feedback dialogues. To better understand the process of setting these goals, we held three focus groups (N = 11): aside from the Westerveld framework, students used previous experience in rotations, outcome expectations, and personal characteristics as sources in their goal-setting process. REFLECTION: The contrast between students’ aims to improve their actionability and their goals to initiate dialogues, suggests that overcoming practice barriers to initiating dialogues are conditional to developing other feedback dialogue aspects. These and other goal conflicts in the workplace may hinder them setting specific feedback dialogue goals. We recommend explicit discussion of these challenges and conflicts in interprofessional feedback dialogue education.