Special edition booklet: Interprofessional Training – Published by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Gesellschaft für Medizinische Ausbildung

Today, anyone who chooses a career in the health care sector in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland usually stays among their peers – both during their studies as well as their professional training. To date, study courses in the fields of medicine and care, health care and nursing training, and studies and training in the therapeutic professions such as physiotherapy or speech therapy, as well as the medical-technical careers, almost entirely focus on one profession. However, in light of the increase in chronic diseases and the growing importance of multiple morbidities and dementia – also in regards to demographic changes – interprofessionally coordinated care is becoming more and more important. These demographic and epidemiological changes are resulting in increasingly complex situations and processes for care, the handling of which – in terms of the health, safety, and quality of life of the patient – can only be successful through sound collaboration. An awareness of the tasks, competencies, and responsibilities of the other career fields is fundamental for collaboration in ensuring highquality care for the patients. However, acquisition of these interprofessional skills, abilities, and expertise, as well as knowledge of the intersections between and transition from one health care profession to another, is hardly been supported. Training in the areas of communicative and social skills in interprofessional settings with regard to successful instances of collaboration is also only found sporadically in various curricula. Collaborative learning can foster the development of these skills and combat the formation of barriers and misconceptions about the other job categories. Interprofessional collaboration alone will most likely not be able to solve all future problems and challenges in patient care. However, it is a necessity to be able to meet today’s requirements and to take on new challenges professionally. This includes – for all job categories – awareness of and reflection on one’s own role, tasks, and responsibilities, as well as those of the other job categories when working together. The chances of success for collaboration are much higher if it is learned during a training or study course and continuously trained and practiced via professional development. Exactly this was the impetus for the Robert Bosch Stiftung to launch the Operation Team– Interprofessional Training in Health Care Professions program. The objective of this support is to disrupt the “monoprofessional” training culture and to implement a structural anchor of interprofessional training opportunities of substantial scope and quality, as well as to establish interprofessional training as an integral element in the training portfolio of the health care sector. This objective is ambitious, and the path will be long and arduous. The current conditions seem to indicate that the time is now for this integration of interprofessional training elements: the very positive response to all advertisements of the Operation Team and the impressively high number of submissions are indications of this. Over the past few years, several projects have been initiated at various locations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and a number of ideas for interprofessional learning and teaching have been carried out. Many different curricular measures and projects in training and professional development have already been initiated, and experience has been gathered on topics ranging from structuring the content of interprofessional training courses to various constellations of target groups and institutional connections. A significant intention – and the next logical step – was therefore to record these experiences, describing the respective projects, achieving harmony between the level of research regarding inter-