Abstract

Background: The complex health issues require comprehensive health practice involving various professions. Inter-professional education employing various learning activities method has been proposed to improve the quality of collaboration and attitude toward other profession. This study aimed to explore students' participation and social interaction within community based IPE, and finding out the result of community health problems that had been addressed by the group. Method: A total of 78 final pre-clinical year students from medical, nursing, and midwifery were randomly divided into 15 interprofessional groups. Interprofessional education program employing surveys and discussion to solve community health problems was conducted. The information and result of community health problems that had been managed by the groups were collected from the groups' report. Students' discussion sessions were video-recorded and the conversations were verbatim transcribed. Content analysis was applied to evaluate students' participation and social interaction dimension; included eternalization, elicitation, quick consensus building, integration oriented, conflict-oriented consensus building. Statistical analysis was applied to evaluate the data. Results: There were various community health problems, which were identified and successfully managed by the students. There were no different number of participation, externalization, elicitation among the professions (p=0.104, p=0.871, p=0.557 and p=0.072 respectively) during discussion session. Externalization was the most produced statement for sharing knowledge. Equal production of eternalization implies that students gave equal contribution in constructing knowledge during the discussions. Conclusion: Student interprofessional public healthcare teams were potential to solve complex community problems. Community based interprofessional learning promotes equal participation and equal contributions among learners from different health professional background.