On 1 January 2021, the project "¡nterprofessionalism in action!" started with the objective to further improve interprofessional collaboration in practice and training of the health professions, and thus in patient care.

 
The first stage of the project is dedicated to measuring the status quo in Austria and the partner countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland). To what extent is interprofessional teaching taking place already? How are these teaching and learning interventions structured? Which learning objectives are set? What are the didactic focuses?  

In order to answer these questions, staff members of the St. Pölten UAS and the partner universities developed a comprehensive questionnaire. It aims to collect as many practical examples of interprofessional teaching as possible and seeks to make them visible in a further step. With active support by Alexandra Tulla, a colleague of the UAS service unit Higher Education Development, the questionnaire was formatted as a Lime Survey and sent to higher education institutions in Austria and the partner countries on 18 March 2021. The data will be collected until 30. April 2021. 

What data will be collected: examples from training in the health professions and in social work in Austria, which offer members or students of two or more professional groups the opportunity to learn together as well as from and about each other in order to improve collaboration and quality of care provision (CAIPE 2019). The teaching practice examples of bachelor and master degree programmes should involve students working together collaboratively (e.g. in interprofessional teams) within the framework of teaching. 

What happens to the results? 
1.    The collected practice examples will be shared with an interested public on the project website (available as from April) after the data have been converted into a visual format by Theresa Draxler (student of the master degree programme Digital Healthcare) within the framework of her master thesis.
2.    The collected ideas also serve as an inspiration for the development of an international, interprofessional and practice-oriented online pilot project, which is carried out within the framework of the INPRO project 2022 at the St. Pölten UAS.