The interprofessional team on set.

As part of TIGER (Transforming Interprofessional Groups Through Educational Resources) Paramedic science and midwifery health professionals at the University of Northampton have joined forces with the police in the School of Social Science and academics and students from the School of the Arts to develop a new interprofessional learning resource.

Initially academics from health and social science met and agreed it would be really helpful to develop some interprofessional learning resources that focussed on situations where these three professionals found themselves working together. Interprofessional education has been an important part of health education at the university for ten years with a growing number of professions becoming involved. There has been much discussion about the police being involved in some interprofessional learning with recognition that new resources would have to be developed to effectively meet the needs of specific groups of students. At the CAIPE (Centre for advancement of Interprofessional Education) corporate forum, held at Leicester University in March 2011, the plans for this work were presented and there is some interest in this resource from the interprofessional education community.

Over some months a scenario was developed based on a real case of domestic violence involving a young pregnant woman with some amendments to ensure anonymity and to highlight interprofessional learning opportunities. Initial thoughts were that students could role play, this was discarded as we felt students would focus on the role rather than interprofessional learning. We then thought actors could role play with students observing and then facilitated discussion however it was felt this would be difficult to replicate and may difficult to organise as a regular event. It was agreed to ask acting students to play the role and we would film this giving us a resource that we could reuse with different groups of students with relative ease. This was where it really got interesting as the performing arts tutor began to work with us and the students, auditions were held on 13th May, the actors cast and filming set for 20th May.

On 20th May, acting, paramedic, police and midwifery professionals were at the ‘scene of crime’ house used for police training in Northampton with 2 police students and 8 acting students. We (health) had turned up with our Flip cameras thinking we would just point and film and be finished by lunchtime – not to be the case! Within an hour one of the Arts tutors had borrowed some equipment to make a broadcast quality film. We spent the whole day drawing storyboards, rehearsing and filming with the acting tutors directing the filming, with students operating the film equipment. Students put great effort into their acting roles with health and police professionals offering advice and guidance on the authenticity of their professional representation.

Why have I blogged this? Everyone involved enjoyed and benefitted from this experience and while our original aim was to develop resources for interprofessional learning what happened was that as a team we demonstrated effective interprofessional working and learning. There was great sharing of skills and expertise, definite learning with, from and about each other and the outcome benefitted from this. I learned about filming, the limitations of Flip, the benefits of having the right equipment and also importantly having someone with the knowledge and expertise required for the job. I also learned that every room has its own sound!

The film is currently being edited and it will be available as an open educational resource (OER) in the TIGER repository later this summer.

Key words: interprofessional education, TIGER, open educational resources (OERs), ukoer

Ali Ewing