Fostering students’ interprofessional feedback dialogues in health professions education

Abstract

Interprofessional feedback helps health profession trainees collaborate and learn in the complex, ever-changing clinical workplace. Fostering interprofessional feedback processes is thus a key aim of interprofessional education, where students from different professions learn ‘with, from, and about each other’. To better understand and support interprofessional feedback education in health professions education, in this thesis, we draw from the broader field of higher education research. In the last decade, scholars in the higher education research field have been moving away from traditional definitions of feedback as information transmission, increasingly defining feedback as a process in which learners seek, make sense of, and use feedback information. Moving away from transmission-based views on feedback has led some scholars to advocate for feedback dialogue—the ongoing exchange, clarification, and alteration of ideas through asking and responding to questions—as a means to construct feedback processes. In this thesis, we argue that this dialogue perspective is especially relevant and necessary in health professions education. Drawing from contemporary insights in feedback literature, we investigate how, when, and why feedback dialogue training in the interprofessional setting works. Through this, we aim to gain insight into how to foster students’ interprofessional feedback dialogues through educational design. The overarching research question is: How can healthcare students’ interprofessional feedback dialogues be fostered in health professions education?