78 Chapter 5 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 control group. Students had no prior interprofessional education experience. Setting and assignment At the Northwest Clinics in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, the students were asked to draw up health care plans for four paper-based geriatric patient cases, over a one-year period. The four cases, with an increasing level of difficulty and typical geriatric care problems, were constructed in collaboration with several geriatric experts (Teuwen et al., 2020). 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. The first patient case is visible in the supplementary files, as an example (Supplementary file A – Case one). 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 intervention 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. In the control group, students wrote the health care plans on their own (uniprofessional education group, i.e., UPE-group). In the intervention group, the health care plans were written by randomly paired medical and nursing students (interprofessional education group, i.e., IPE-group) (Figure 5.1). In each session different pairs were assembled to create diversity among the collaboration partners. The intervention group was placed in a different (class)room, separate from the control group. The scheduled time for the assignment was 45 minutes. A researcher or research assistant supervised the students for identifying (non-)collaboration and was available to answer procedural questions.
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