Collaboration between different health care professions is essential for providing good patient care. To ensure successful communication and collaboration in interprofessional teams, future professionals should ideally learn the necessary skills and competencies during their education. After all, collaboration in interprofessional teams only works where professionals can act based on a shared understanding. While the subject of interprofessional learning and teaching has gained importance in recent years, academic research of the area is still in its infancy. Moreover, there aren’t enough junior researchers working to advance the topic in academia. For this reason, we have established ILEGRA (Interprofessional Teaching in Healthcare), the world’s first graduate program to enhance Interprofessional research in the health care professions, as a collaborative project between the University of Osnabrück and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. Through this junior researcher program, we support 12 PhD students from health care professions (nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and human medicine), offer them a stipend and a support program. The dissertations being produced are investigating research topics in the areas of mediation, evaluation, and examining interprofessional teaching. We hope that by supporting junior researchers in this field, we can help advance the interprofessional research area in Germany and internationally, thus contributing to improving the quality of care.
Adobestock/Contrastwerkstatt