Charting a new course in knowledge: creating life-long critical care thinkers.

The Registered Nurses Professional Development Centre's Critical Care Nursing Program situated in Halifax, Nova Scotia, aspires to provide evidence-based critical care nursing education. Using a didactic traditional lecture-based teaching method, the faculty noted that some learners were not prepared for class, preferred memorization of content and were not engaged in their learning. In 2008, faculty acknowledged the need to change their principal teaching method in the full-time program to a method that would foster student engagement and active learning while inspiring registered nurses to become life-long critical thinkers.

Development and validation of the interprofessional collaborator assessment rubric (ICAR).

There have been increasing calls for a competency-based approach in interprofessional education (IPE). The purpose of this multi-site research project was to develop a validated set of interprofessional collaborator competencies and an associated competency-based assessment rubric, in both English and French languages. The first phase involved a detailed comparative analysis of peer-reviewed and grey literature using typological analysis to construct a draft list of interprofessional collaborator competency categories and statements.

Performance-based competencies for culturally responsive interprofessional collaborative practice.

This paper will highlight how a literature review and stakeholder-expert feedback guided the creation of an interprofessional facilitator-collaborator competency tool, which was then used to design an interprofessional facilitator development program for the Partners for Interprofessional Cancer Education (PICE) Project. Cancer Care Nova Scotia (CCNS), one of the PICE Project partners, uses an Interprofessional Core Curriculum (ICC) to provide continuing education workshops to community-based practitioners, who as a portion of their practice, care for patients experiencing cancer. In order to deliver this curriculum, health professionals from a variety of disciplines required education that would enable them to become culturally sensitive interprofessional educators in promoting collaborative patient-centred practice.