gms | German Medical Science

Background: interTUT, an interprofessional project existing since October 2013, was initially financed in two phases by the promotion program “operation team” by Robert Bosch Stiftung until October 2017. Since then it is entirely financed and supported by our cooperation partners shown below and curricular implemented.

Aim & question: Interprofessional collaboration – how to set the course during education already? The lack of cooperation between health professions in daily practice, prejudices, deficient appreciation and inadequate communication with other professional fields result in a decrease in patients care. Aiming for improvement interTUT gathers insights about interprofessional peer assisted learning (PAL) and evaluates advantages and viability for undergraduate health professions in interprofessional tutorials – often a moment of the first encounter for students.

Method: interTUT offers interprofessional, peer assisted learning tutorials 5 to 6 times per month via an interprofessional tandem of tutors. The tutorials have 7 different topics with a duration from 2-4 hours and for max. 15 students of different health professions (essentially medicine, nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy) (see figure 1 [Fig. 1]). Due to the pandemic, 3 tutorials were adapted to online formats, each one allowing max. 10 participants to join via Microsoft Teams.

Results: From October 2017 – September 2020 75 tutorials with 863 participants were held. Of these, 471 were medical students, 109 students/apprentices of nursing as well as 152 of physiotherapy and 119 occupational therapy students. By evaluation via direct feedback and paperbased evaluation provided by “Lernzentrum Charité” after each tutorial interTUT continuously tries to improve the tutorials and match demands by developing new ones. The results and experiences show high acceptance, satisfaction and a demand for more offer.

Discussion: Using a structure where students of health professions can progress teamwork before the first encounter in professional practice and get a feeling for the interfaces in daily working life our project is showing that interprofessional PAL is valuable and beneficial to undergraduate health professions for creating a common foundation for high-quality health care.