Physician development through interprofessional workplace interactions: A critical review

Increasingly, medical training aims to develop physicians who are competent collaborators. Although interprofessional interactions are inevitable elements of medical trainees' workplace learning experiences, the existing literature lacks a cohesive model to conceptualise the learning potential residing in these interactions. We conducted a critical review of the health professions and related educational literatures to generate an empirically and theoretically informed description of medical trainees' workplace interactions with other health professionals, including learning mechanisms and outcomes. Informed by Teunissen's conceptualisation of workplace learning, we highlight the individual, social and situated dimensions of learning from interprofessional workplace interactions. Workplace interactions between medical trainees and other health professionals tend to be brief, spontaneous, informal and often implicit without the predefined educational goals and roles that structure trainees' relationships with physician supervisors. Yet they hold potential for developing trainees' knowledge and skills germane to the work of a physician as well as building their capacity for collaboration. Our review identified a spectrum of learning theories helpful for examining what and how trainees learn from these interactions. Self-regulated learning theories focus attention on how learning depends on trainees interpreting and judging the cues offered by other health professionals. Sociocultural frameworks including the zone of proximal development and legitimate peripheral participation emphasise the ways other health professionals support trainees in performing tasks at the border of their abilities and facilitate trainees' participation in clinical work. Both the landscapes of practice theory and cultural historical activity theory highlight the influence of surrounding social, cultural and material environments. These theories are unified into cohesive model and demonstrated through an illustrative example. Interprofessional workplace interactions harbour a range of learning opportunities for medical trainees. Capitalising on their potential can contribute to training collaborative practice-ready physicians alongside traditional intra-professional interactions between physicians and merits future research.