Collaboration is key

Interprofessional collaboration is defined as ‘two or more professions working together to create or achieve a shared goal’. This is common to many aspects of physiotherapy to help us to do more than we can alone. By working together, we aim to create better health services and outcomes for people and populations, improve efficiency, develop more holistic services and accelerate innovation and creativity to deal with the complexities of modern health care.

One area of challenge facing many health professions is student placements. The CSP and the RCOT saw an opportunity to work together to produce a set of ‘Principles of Practice-based Learning’ with a shared goal to support the development of quality, inclusive and sustainable placements across the professions.

‘Working together has enabled us to learn from each other and go beyond traditional ways of thinking,’ says Tamsin Baird, CSP education adviser.

‘It made sense…. we’ve been able to pool our knowledge and approaches to better address many challenges that are relevant across both professions. As well as having further reach, we believe this makes the document stronger.’ She adds, ‘this whole process has also developed good relations that I’m sure will continue to be built upon in the future.’

Carolyn Hay, RCOT pre-registration education manager, adds that: ‘As we’ve progressed in developing the principles, we have ideas of other opportunities to support all those involved in placement delivery, and we are keen to continue to collaborate to support this priority topic.’

Collaboration is echoed in the principles, which have a strong theme of working together to address the complexities of placements.

They are a reference point for everyone involved in supporting the education of our pre-registration students and apprentices.

Tamsin Baird is a CSP education adviser, Carolyn Hay is head of education at RCOT