In recent decades, the gap between groups experiencing health or ill-health has increased both globally and locally. In response to these challenges, interprofessional collaboration between health care providers has been suggested as the most important improvement in care delivery, in particular to patients with complicated medical conditions.
It has been argued that these skills are not intuitive or learned at work and the current training of health professionals has been criticized for insufficient preparation of students for interprofessional collaboration. Thereby, interprofessional education needs to be implemented into curricula, preferably introduced early in undergraduate education. Students´ readiness to collaborate seems to be related to sex and type of health care education, and is influenced by personality.
There seems to be a scarcity of studies exploring health care students’ personality traits and readiness for interprofessional collaboration, which most likely impact on their competence and willingness to learn in an interprofessional team. In addition, despite convincing arguments stating that patients’ participation in health care decisions is associated with better health-related outcomes for the participating patient, few studies that explore patients’ and next-of-kins’ experience of participation in interprofessional teams have been systematically explored.
The overall aim for is two-fold. First, to investigate influencing factors of interprofessional learning and to explore readiness and self-assessed self-efficacy for competence in interprofessional collaboration in relation to personality traits in health care students. Second, to explore the effectiveness of interprofessional education on patients´ experience of participation. Third, to explore next-of-kins’ experience of participating in interprofessional healthcare teams.