At the School of Health Professions Education (SHE), Juliët Beuken is researching how healthcare professionals learn to collaborate with each other in practice, and all the challenges that come with it. She investigates this with the concept of multiperspectivity, emphasizing the different viewpoints of healthcare providers. If you understand that each healthcare provider has a different perspective on care, then you can use that to improve care and promote collaboration among healthcare providers. Together with colleagues ‘on both sides of the bridge’ (referring to the walkway between the faculty and the hospital) Juliët explores collaboration among different healthcare providers (interprofessional collaboration), but also with patients, who naturally have their own perspective on care.

"If possible, as a healthcare provider, you also collaborate with the patient."

Why is collaboration in healthcare such a challenge?

During her doctoral research on healthcare across borders in the Euregion Meuse-Rhine, Juliët noticed that collaboration is a major challenge. In interviews, healthcare providers shared what makes (international) collaboration difficult: different languages, procedures, trainings, systems, and cultures. Needless to say, also the high workload in healthcare plays a role. Healthcare providers mainly want to ensure that they have fulfilled their own responsibilities. They often do not consider how they can collaborate better with colleagues across the border, with whom they care for patients together.

Juliët says, "The challenge of collaboration in cross-border healthcare is that healthcare providers from different countries need to get to know each other and understand each other's ways of working. Only then can they adapt to each other. This is a complex process and it takes time. Moreover, every collaboration is different, so you are never done in one go."

Collaboration across borders intensifies challenges that also occur in collaboration within borders, and even within one organization. Because within the walls of the hospital, there are already differences between healthcare providers. Juliët is convinced that healthcare providers can learn from other perspectives by practicing in healthcare practice and in health professions education. Many healthcare providers are naturally empathetic, and almost everyone recognizes the importance of good collaboration in healthcare. 

"We mainly need to develop good education to support this process of collaborative learning."

Learning to collaborate

Collaboration is something healthcare providers still learn far too little about. One of the challenges Juliët observes in her research is that students are often trained separately. During their studies, they learn about their own role in healthcare - what, when, and how things should be done - without understanding how that relates to the roles of other healthcare providers, or to the healthcare system.

"It's a bit like being a choir singer learning your own melody, and only finding out during the concert what other singers are chanting. Then you're actually too late to really learn how to sing together well."

Research into healthcare education also often remains limited to one specific programme. Medical education is often the focus of university research because it is familiar territory: that programme is literally and figuratively close by.

Interprofessional education

A good solution to this challenge is interprofessional education, where students and healthcare providers from different professions learn together. This way, they not only see how their different roles contribute to patient care as a whole, but also how they can collaborate with each other in patient care. Fortunately, this already happens quite often, but this type of education is mostly brief: with a half-day workshop or a two-hour training, you can only move a small stone in a river. Moreover, in such a short time, it is difficult to address challenges such as hierarchy. When interprofessional education becomes a larger part of the curricula, students and healthcare providers can truly get to know each other. This way, they are much better coordinated before entering healthcare practice, which hopefully improves the quality of patient care.