Nurses' views of interprofessional education and collaboration: A comparative study of recent graduates from three universities

Today interprofessional education (IPE) is spread throughout the world. In Sweden only one of the existing nursing programs has an IPE curriculum on several levels during the training. The aim of this study was to examine how nurses who recently graduated from universities with IPE or non-IPE curricula perceive the importance of different educational goals and whether they found themselves prepared for their profession, and especially for collaboration with other professions. Three universities with different commitments to IPE were studied. We used a survey with eight different targets: communication skills, cooperation with other professions, problem-solving capability, self-directed learning skills, whether their education has prepared them to work professionally, to perform research, to take care of acutely ill patients, to work preventively and working as a nurse. The participants were asked whether their undergraduate education had prepared them for these targets and whether they perceived that the targets were important goals for their education. A main result in this study was that nurses who had recently graduated from the IPE university perceived to a greater extent that their undergraduate training had prepared them to work together with other professions in comparison with nursing students from non-IPE universities.