62 Chapter 4 at the Northwest Academy, and medical students of the VU University attending their transition courses at Northwest Academy, attended four IPE-sessions over a period of one year. During each session, randomly paired couples of one medical student and one nursing student were asked to write a health care plan for a fictitious patient case that was discussed. The patient cases were constructed with the involvement of different experts, including clinical specialists, nurses, general practitioners, ensuring everyone’s perspective was well represented (Teuwen et al., 2020). While discussing the patient’s problems and possible diagnostics or interventions, students learn with, from and about each other. In the periods in between these sessions, the students attended their scheduled internships at different hospitals. In this study, ‘IPE’ refers to the four sessions in a classroom setting, where student pairs wrote health care plans together. ‘IPC’ refers to the interprofessional contacts students had during their internships in clinical practice. Participants The nursing and medical students who followed this IPE-course were interviewed at the end of the year. The nursing students were third- and fourth-year students, following a four-year educational program. In the third and fourth year of their education, these students worked in clinical practice during 80% of the time and attended courses and training in the remaining 20%. The medical students were fifth year students, having finished a 3-year bachelor’s program and were halfway through their 3-year master’s program in medicine. They had finished four clerkships, including four transition courses. Both groups of students had a wide range of experiences in clinical practice, and in different disciplines. Because of these experiences, we expected them to have had interprofessional contacts during different occasions and, therefore, to have a clear understanding of interprofessional collaboration in clinical practice. The sampling was purposeful since participants were students that had experienced IPC after IPE-sessions and nursing and medical students were equally represented. We continued sampling until data sufficiency was reached (i.e. when no new information emerged from the interviews and the gathered data was sufficient to answer the research question) (Suri, 2011). Interviews Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews were conducted using an interview guide with three main topics. To introduce the topic, each interview began with the question, ‘what’s your opinion about the classroom IPE-sessions that you attended?’.
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