My latest article! On what health professions ed. can learn from theatre about collaboration

It’s here, it’s here!  

My friends, I am thrilled (THRILLED!) to share that my latest article has been published in Advances in Health Sciences Education. It’s called “Playing well with others: lessons from theatre for the health professions about collaboration, creativity and community” and it’s co-authored by the amazing Carrie Cartmill and Dr. Cynthia Whitehead.

This was one of the most fun articles I have written to date and I am so excited to share it with the world. And, even better, it is open access - you can download a pdf when you follow the link.

Carrie, Cynthia and I came together as a research team with the suggestion by the brilliant Dr. Elise Paradis - we set off with the task of producing a paper related to interprofessional collaboration in health care.  Carrie, Cynthia and I began in-depth conversations about the ways that interprofessional collaboration is recognized as fundamentally important to current and future health care practices, BUT ALSO how there doesn’t seem to be a lot of clarity about when and how to teach collaboration to students within different professional training programs.  In what ways are physicians trained to collaborate with, say, nurses, or physiotherapists, or social workers? Are physiotherapists taught about how to collaborate with physicians and nurses? The list goes on!

We started to muse about the ways that collaboration might be traced historically within Canadian health professions education  (like, when did interprofessional collaboration start to become recognized as important in Canada? How and when is training in collaboration approached across different professions? How is collaboration even conceptualized in health care?).  We chatted about the possibility of doing historical research within one health care profession, and tracking how discourse may have changed over time about interprofessional collaboration.

At the end of one such chat, I chuckled about how these discussions were reminding me of my home turf, theatre.  Cynthia’s ears perked - “tell me more” she said.  I shared about how theatre is a highly collaborative profession. In theatre there are different practitioners (designers, technicians, actors, director, stage manager, etc!) who have different skills and training, who all work within the same industry towards a similar goal - to create a piece of theatre.  Theatre practitioners work interprofessionally.  “There are just so many parallels!” I giggled, “ Health professions education could probably learn a lot about how to think about collaboration from theatre...”

“That’s our paper!” Cynthia cried (ok, she didn’t really “cry”, but you can forgive my attempts at some dramatic effect…)

And 18 months later, you can find the results here.