Exploring the nature of interprofessional collaboration and family member involvement in an intensive care context.

Little is known about the nature of interprofessional collaboration on intensive care units (ICUs), despite its recognition as a key component of patient safety and quality improvement initiatives. This comparative ethnographic study addresses this gap in knowledge and explores the different factors that influence collaborative work in the ICU. It aims to develop an empirically grounded team diagnostic tool, and associated interventions to strengthen team-based care and patient family involvement.

Tensions in informed self-assessment: how the desire for feedback and reticence to collect and use it can conflict.

Purpose: Informed self-assessment describes the set of processes through which individuals use external and internal data to generate an appraisal of their own abilities. The purpose of this project was to explore the tensions described by learners and professionals when informing their self-assessments of clinical performance.

Method: This 2008 qualitative study was guided by principles of grounded theory.

Features of assessment learners use to make informed self-assessments of clinical performance.

Context: Conceptualisations of self-assessment are changing as its role in professional development comes to be viewed more broadly as needing to be both externally and internally informed through activities that enable access to and the interpretation and integration of data from external sources. Education programmes use various activities to promote learners' reflection and self-direction, yet we know little about how effective these activities are in 'informing' learners' self-assessments.

Objectives: This study aimed to increase understanding of the specific ways in which undergraduate and postgraduate learners used learning and assessment activities to inform self-assessments of their clinical performance.

The processes and dimensions of informed self-assessment: a conceptual model.

Purpose: To determine how learners and physicians engaged in various structured interventions to inform self-assessment, how they perceived and used self-assessment in clinical learning and practice, and the components and processes comprising informed self-assessment and factors that influence these.

Method: This was a qualitative study guided by principles of grounded theory. Using purposive sampling, eight programs were selected in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium, representing low, medium, and high degrees of structure/rigor in self-assessment activities.