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One of the main tasks of the Academic primary health center as it comes to management of students’ clinical education, is to promote interprofessional learning, ie students from different professional fields learning with, from and about each other (Caipe, 2000).

This is also expressed as a specific learning objective for students’ clinical education formulated by the universities for all academic programmes in health care (although sometimes with differing stringency).

It is from this point of view surely interesting to read about Wenger’s (2010) explanation of the process of learning occuring with specific qualities in the boundary of knowledge landscapes. The description of the dynamics of interaction between practices adds deeper understanding to the phenomenon of interprofessional learning which Caipe (2000) refered to as inherent of the capacity to build new knowledge together, across professional fields. As stated by Wenger (2010), this knowledge boundary region, this moment of meeting where practices, competencies and knowledge history crash into each other, opens up possibilities for innovation, new solutions and thinking beyond the already known.

Despite obvious contributions with the interprofessional perspective in learning though, it continues to be one of our great challenges (not at least logistically) to make these moments happen in clinical education.

Digitalizing and opening up our educational methods might help us reaching students and bringing them together interprofessionaly more easily. We still will have to consider basic requirements though, such as infrastructural conditions, students’ needs, formulation of learning objectives and teachers’ competence (Anderson, 2008).

References:

Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an online learning context. In The theory and practice of online learning(pp. 343-395). Athabasca university press.
Caipe. (2000). What is Caipe? Found 161103 at: https://www.caipe.org

Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179-198). Springer London.