52 Chapter 3 make students appreciate the other one’s view. These would be our recommendations to set up case-based IPE in order to enhance the quality of health care plans. Study limitations This study is subject to limitations. First the couples worked on the health care plan together, while in the uniprofessional group the students worked on the assignment alone. As mentioned in the methods section, we chose this solo assignment in the uniprofessional group, because it best reflects standard education (being mostly uniprofessional) and standard clinical practice. Another methodological option could have been to pair up two students of the same profession to work on the health care plan. This collaboration between two students of the same profession was not investigated, and seemed less relevant, since professionals more often work on health care plans alone. They might discuss their plans during hand-offs and Multidisciplinary Team Meetings, but we believe the dynamics in these discussions are different from the dynamics we investigated. Although theoretically two students may come up with more points than an individual student, our study focused on the actual differences between the plans and not only on the quantitative scores. Uniprofessional collaboration may have also improved the plans, but since there is no knowledge transfer in uniprofessional setting, it is questionable if UPE-couples would identify the same items as IPE-couples in this study. Within the UPE- and IPEgroups, 7 students could have benefitted from some knowledge transfer, because they switched between the two groups for a single session. The three students that worked on a health care plan alone for one session might have learned something from previous IPE-sessions. The four students that joined the IPE group for once, might have learned something from that session and transferred that to the next UPE-session(s) four months later. Nevertheless, we don’t think this lead to bias in our results, because it is a small number of students, it was only one session, and each patient case was different. Second, when interprofessional couples were collaborating about the treatment plans, overhearing conversations of other couples was not ruled out. To minimize this effect, couples were placed away from others as much as possible, also using workplaces outside of the classroom and at the library. The researcher and research assistants that supervised the sessions facilitated other workplaces and enough space between couples. Third, this study was conducted in a classroom setting, so we don’t know if the same results could be attained with real patients in clinical practice.
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