To provide appropriate healthcare services to all patients, strong interprofessional partnerships are essential. We have developed a voluntary community-based interprofessional education (IPE) program for medical students and other healthcare students. In this program, students from different healthcare fields conduct fieldwork together in small groups. The purpose of this study was to determine what participants learned through the IPE program.
1) Five researchers with different healthcare backgrounds analyzed all (63) participants' postprogram reports (collected since 2002) and extracted and categorized items describing what the participants had learned.
2) The categories of items learned included the roles of healthcare professionals, cooperation among healthcare professionals, the meaning of “community medicine”, the difficulty and the importance of communication, and a sense of fellowship with participants of other backgrounds.
3) These items indicate our IPE program helps students learn about interprofessional cooperation by observing actual examples of cooperation in the community and by working with students from different healthcare fields.