Interprofessional students’ insights into the experiential learning environment: Values, impacts, and alignment with interprofessional collaborative practice competencies and the triple aim

The experiential learning environment offers an ideal opportunity for students to observe and develop their interprofessional competencies. However, it is unclear whether interprofessional concepts are integrated into experiential learning in ways that are tangible and identifiable to the students. This study aimed to gain understanding of which elements of interprofessional collaboration in experiential learning environments are observed by students from various professions during experiential rotations; which of those are most valuable to student learning and which could be improved; in what ways students see interprofessional collaboration in practice impacting learners, provider teams, communities, and health systems; and whether student perceptions of the impacts of interprofessional collaboration align with one or more Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) competency areas and/or components of the Triple/Quadruple Aim. Results demonstrate that students perceive impacts related most often to their individual lens and to patient care and are less frequently focused on system-level observations. Intentional and innovative efforts must be made by academic programs, interprofessional education programs, experiential placement sites, and health professions accreditors to make the impacts on care systems, cost of care, communities, and populations more explicit in the experiential learning environment in pursuit of the Triple Aim.