3 43 The differences in content of health care plans in that stage of their education program at our facility between March 2018 and March 2019 were included in the study, which meant three groups of nursing students. Assignment to the IPE- or UPE-group took place at the first session. The nursing students were individually randomly (alphabetically) assigned to the IPE- or UPEgroup. The medical students were starting their master’s program, after finishing a 3-year bachelor’s program. The master’s program consists of different clerkships. Every six weeks a group of maximum 9 students started their clerkships at the Northwest Academy. All students of all groups that started between March 2018 and March 2019 were asked if they would like to participate in the study. Assignment to the IPE- or UPE-group took place at the first session. Before assigning them to one of the two groups, their schedule was evaluated for a match with the nursing students’ program at all sessions. If there were sessions, for example during holiday breaks of the nursing education program during which the medical students could not collaborate with nursing students, the whole group of medical students was assigned to the UPE-group. Between the research sessions, the students attended their scheduled internships at different hospitals. Assignment All students attended four sessions IPE or UPE over the period of one year. During each session the students wrote a health care plan for a paper-based geriatric patient case. Four cases were constructed with the involvement of different experts (e.g., clinical specialists, nurses, general practitioners), to ensure that perspectives from the different care-givers were well-represented (Teuwen et al., 2020). The four patient cases had an increasing level of difficulty to match students’ progression in their studies. A patient case included information about the patient’s background, medication, description of the current health problem, social and functional status and some results from a physical examination. Students were asked to draw up a health care plan ‘like they would in clinical practice’. They were allowed the use of books or guidelines, but were not allowed to discuss with others (except their assigned partner if they were in the IPE-group). In the instructions the students were suggested to think of diagnostics, medication, consultation of different specialists, nursing interventions and ‘to-do’ tasks before discharge. The first patient case is visible in the supplementary files, as an example (Supplementary file A – Case one). All students, nursing and medical, had had practice and teaching about how to write a care plan in their regular educational program, before entering the study.
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