Paper recommends interprofessional education through shadowing

Dec. 3, Hamilton, ON
– A newly published paper in the journal Chiropractic
and Osteopathy recommends mandatory interprofessional shadowing in
chiropractic education.

The paper
is co-authored by a multidisciplinary team headed by Dr. John Riva, a
chiropractor and faculty member at the McMaster University School of
Medicine.  Its premise springboards from
the recent World Health Organization’s recognition of the necessity for
including interprofessional education within the training of health care
professionals.  The team suggests that
chiropractic training institutions should adopt shadowing in a
multidisciplinary clinical setting to facilitate indepth learning regarding the
roles and methods of practitioners in other disciplines.  To lend support for the ideas for
interprofessional education that the authors purport in this paper, as well as
to demonstrate that other professions are also active in implementing
interprofessional education strategies, similar learning initiatives in the
areas of pharmacy and medicine are described. 

The authors review a variety of learning models, structures and goals
for interprofessional education during training and describe how these can be
made relevant to chiropractic students as well as how chiropractic can be
taught to students in other disciplines through shadowing experiences.  

The
authors seem motivated, throughout the paper, to harness interprofessional
education in order to bring about seamless interdisciplinary, patient-centred
care in practice, both by chiropractors as well as by practitioners in other
disciplines.  The paper points out a
lack, within the chiropractic literature, of syntheses of interdisciplinary
experiences and adds to its salient recommendations a suggestion that more of
these should be undertaken within the profession. 

To view a
provisional abstract and/or pdf of this paper, click on http://www.chiroandosteo.com/content/pdf/1746-1340-18-31.pdf