Charting a new course in knowledge: creating life-long critical care thinkers.

The Registered Nurses Professional Development Centre's Critical Care Nursing Program situated in Halifax, Nova Scotia, aspires to provide evidence-based critical care nursing education. Using a didactic traditional lecture-based teaching method, the faculty noted that some learners were not prepared for class, preferred memorization of content and were not engaged in their learning. In 2008, faculty acknowledged the need to change their principal teaching method in the full-time program to a method that would foster student engagement and active learning while inspiring registered nurses to become life-long critical thinkers. After consulting with colleagues, attending conferences and reviewing the literature, team-based learning (TBL) was chosen as the strategy to achieve this goal. Although some challenges were experienced during the adoption of TBL, the faculty believed that TBL enhanced the learners' critical thinking abilities and teamwork skills.

Development and validation of the interprofessional collaborator assessment rubric (ICAR).

There have been increasing calls for a competency-based approach in interprofessional education (IPE). The purpose of this multi-site research project was to develop a validated set of interprofessional collaborator competencies and an associated competency-based assessment rubric, in both English and French languages. The first phase involved a detailed comparative analysis of peer-reviewed and grey literature using typological analysis to construct a draft list of interprofessional collaborator competency categories and statements. A two-round Delphi survey of experts was undertaken to validate these competencies. In the second phase, an assessment rubric was developed based on the validated competencies and then evaluated for utility, clarity, practicality and fairness through multi-site focus groups with students and faculty at both college and university levels. The paper outlines an approach to developing, constructing and validating a bilingual instrument for interprofessional learning and assessment. The approach was collaborative in nature, involving an interprofessional project team and respondents from across multiple health profession education programs. The Delphi survey ratings indicate a high level of agreement with the importance of the competency statements and focus group participants rated the rubric positively and felt it had value. The focus group results were also useful in pre-piloting the contextual application of the instrument across multiple health profession education programs. This rubric instrument may be used across a variety of professions and learning contexts. Future work includes evaluation of further dimensions of validity and reliability for this tool across a variety of settings.

Performance-based competencies for culturally responsive interprofessional collaborative practice.

This paper will highlight how a literature review and stakeholder-expert feedback guided the creation of an interprofessional facilitator-collaborator competency tool, which was then used to design an interprofessional facilitator development program for the Partners for Interprofessional Cancer Education (PICE) Project. Cancer Care Nova Scotia (CCNS), one of the PICE Project partners, uses an Interprofessional Core Curriculum (ICC) to provide continuing education workshops to community-based practitioners, who as a portion of their practice, care for patients experiencing cancer. In order to deliver this curriculum, health professionals from a variety of disciplines required education that would enable them to become culturally sensitive interprofessional educators in promoting collaborative patient-centred practice. The Registered Nurses Professional Development Centre (RN-PDC), another PICE Project partner, has expertise in performance-based certification program design and utilizes a competency-based methodology in its education framework. This framework and methodology was used to develop the necessary interprofessional facilitator competencies that incorporate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for performance. Three main competency areas evolved, each with its own set of competencies, performance criteria and behavioural indicators.