Evaluating the impact of interprofessional learning on practice: a pedagogic perspective

This paper describes a specific evaluation of interprofessional education (IPE). The evaluation is run alongside an interprofessional continuing professional development (CPD) programme for professionals working across health, social care, and education, who work within services for children and families in England. Furthermore, the evaluated programme is not merely academically focused, but aims to initiate and encourage changes to the way integrated services to children and families are delivered.However, the paper does not only look at the impact of IPE on practice, but also considers the influence of the pedagogy of IPE and how pedagogy may enhance or hinder interprofessional practice.The evaluation is grounded within a conceptual framework. The framework draws upon elements of situated learning theory, Activity Theory (e.g. Engestrom et al 1999) and Dreier’s work (2002, 1999) on trajectories of participation, particularly Personal Action Potency. By combining the resulting analytic framework with an adapted version of Kirkpatrick’s (1994) established evaluation model, a theoretically-driven, practicable evaluation matrix is developed. The matrix is capable of evaluating the impact of pedagogic input on practice change. The paper models a process for developing a conceptual framework to steer pedagogic evaluation. Such a process and the resulting matrix have the potential to be of use to other researchers who are similarly developing pedagogic evaluation.This conceptual framework will be supplemented with preliminary data that has been collected at various time points throughout the CPD programme.