gms | German Medical Science

The medical community has embraced the notion of "expert teams" as critical to its clinical and educational mandates. However, our traditional emphasis on individual competence has not prepared us to grapple effectively with situations in which individually "competent" health professionals combine to form an "incompetent" team. We need better ways of conceptualizing competence as a collective characteristic of teams, and we need improved training practices to support the development of this collective competence.

This tandem keynote will draw on research from two domains -- the study of collaborative clinical practice and the study of collaborative learning -- to stimulate discussion of how medical education can advance its approaches to training and assessing teamwork at the undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education levels. The keynote will address the following questions:

• What is collaboration and why do we collaborate?
• What do we know on the conditions for both, collaborating to learn as well as learning to collaborate?
• How does collaboration fit with medical education’s current conceptualizations of competence?
• How can we better support collaborative learning in medical education?