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Interprofessional education in health sciences: the University of Queensland Health Care Team Challenge

Rosalie A Boyce, Monica C Moran, Lisa M Nissen, Helen J Chenery and Peter M Brooks
Med J Aust 2009; 190 (8): 433-436. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2009.tb02492.x
Published online: 20 April 2009

Health professionals need to be able to work in teams, but, paradoxically, students receive little training in how to function within an interprofessional teamwork context. Competent patient care increasingly requires practitioners to know how each of the different professions contributes its skills and expertise to optimise health outcomes.1,2 Practitioners also need to respect the contribution of each profession to patient care.

International and domestic policy agencies are urging fundamental reform of the health workforce to place interprofessional competencies on an equal footing with profession-centred expertise.3-6 Employers are demanding that universities provide team-ready graduates who have been exposed to the principles of interprofessional education (IPE) and practice.7-9 Universities face significant logistical problems in aligning curriculum across multiple professions to provide the requisite IPE training opportunities. In this article we present an overview of the University of Queensland Health Care Team Challenge (UQ HCTC), which was designed to respond to the demands for workforce reform and to provide an authentic IPE teamwork experience.

What is the Health Care Team Challenge?

The inaugural UQ HCTC event was held in 2007 (Box 1). It is a voluntary extracurricular learning activity for final-year students to demonstrate best practice in clinical care and interprofessional teamwork in an authentic patient-centred context.12 It culminates in a lively annual public competition between interprofessional student teams. Each team is comprised of nine students, each representing one of the nine professions within the Faculty of Health Sciences. Students are recruited from a widely publicised call for participants and then randomly assigned to a team. The academic panel that supports the event collaborates with an external interprofessional team working in a health service to identify a patient (and carers) willing to be interviewed by the student teams and participate as a part of the judging panel. The academic panel devises the formal case study that has been structured to ensure that there is material relevant to all professions. The panel is also responsible for designing the extension questions, which are revealed for the first time at the competition event.

The UQ HCTC offers “real-life” practice in team-based problem solving, and competition between teams stimulates student motivation and engagement. The extracurricular design of the project helps to overcome some of the impediments faced by other pre-registration IPE projects.8,13-16 These barriers include:

There is an intense 4-week preparation period for the teams before the public event. The crucial output of the pre-event phase is a management plan developed by each team based on a clinical case study scenario. Each case is developed by a team of clinicians from a range of professional backgrounds and based on a complex real-life scenario reflecting a chronic health problem. The case is layered to acknowledge the challenges faced by an individual and his or her family and community. Complications are embedded to challenge students to look beyond their own single-profession sphere of interest and to explore evidence-based and real-world standards of practice. To increase the authenticity of the learning experience, a genuine patient or “standardised patient” (a trained actor) is available for a team interview to assist in the development of the management plan (Box 2).

The teamwork skills developed in the pre-event phase are fundamental to success at the public event play-off, when each team is challenged with two rounds of previously unseen extension scenarios related to the case (Box 3). The judging panel is comprised of the patient and an external interprofessional team practising in the field relevant to the case study. The teams are assessed on multiple criteria: teamwork, collaboration, communication skills, prioritising professional input, understanding of different professional roles, and the degree to which the patient’s needs are integrated into management planning.

Impact of the Health Care Team Challenge on student participants

The aims of the HCTC program were to:

Two months after the HCTC event, eight focus groups were conducted with student participants. Forty-five students attended, with group sizes ranging from two to nine participants. They explored their perceptions of their own role and the role of other professionals in teamwork and patient safety and their commitment to interprofessional practice. Most of the students had returned to clinically based fieldwork and were able to reflect on how the experience had influenced their clinical practice. Transcripts of the focus group meetings are currently being analysed using a content analysis approach. The following are sample quotes:

Future developments

The next organisational challenge is to conduct a national HCTC (OzHCTC) and an international HCTC (Int-HCTC). The 2008 audience was surveyed about their attitudes to a national and international competition: 89/93 respondents (96%) were in favour of an Australian competition, and 86/92 (93%) supported the idea of an Australian team competing in an international challenge. The inaugural OzHCTC will be in Brisbane in August 2009 and the first Int-HCTC is planned for April 2010 in Sydney.

  • Rosalie A Boyce1
  • Monica C Moran2
  • Lisa M Nissen1
  • Helen J Chenery3
  • Peter M Brooks3

  • 1 School of Pharmacy, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD.
  • 2 School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD.
  • 3 Faculty of Health Sciences, The University of Queensland, Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, Brisbane, QLD.


Correspondence: r.boyce@uq.edu.au

Acknowledgements: 

We acknowledge the significant contribution of Emma Poulsen, Project Officer for the UQ HCTC; the academic advisory panel that supports the event; the student participants; and our partners and sponsors from industry, the professions, and the University of British Columbia. The UQ HCTC project has been funded by a UQ Faculty of Health Sciences IPE fellowship and the UQ Teaching and Learning Strategic Grants (large grants) scheme, including partnership funds from Queensland Health.

Competing interests:

None identified.

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