This presentation explores the interface between social practice and health in postgraduate professional education. Nurses, occupational therapists and midwives, like other health professions, work in multidisciplinary teams with social care workers including counsellors and social workers. When we began teaching health and social care professionals together, we did not fully understand how our conceptual approach would work. It was with some trepidation that two lecturers, a counsellor and a nurse, began to imagine how we might create a meaningful approach that would inform the professional development of a seemingly disparate group of postgraduate students. Perhaps for this reason, at the beginning of the semester, nurses might ask, “Why is there a counsellor in the room?”
Understanding professional practice as an interdisciplinary concept enables us to create conceptual connections between the health and social care professions; emphasising similarities in knowledge that informs practitioners’ thinking and reasoning in practice. As an example, inviting students to discuss ethical dilemmas and professional issues outside their own discipline promotes a deeper understanding of the shared challenges of practice across different professions.
We use the metaphor of a three legged stool to conceptualise three different sources of practice knowledge. Practitioners have a propositional evidence base and theoretical body of knowledge that informs the ‘know that’ leg of the stool. The second leg is practice ‘know how’, the interpretive practice knowledge drawn from practitioners’ experience of working in the field. The third leg is the ‘know who’ of practice, where situational knowledge of the client, and personal knowledge of the self, inform professional judgement.
We promote an inquiry approach to learning that fosters self-responsibility and mindfulness, encouraging students to account for the methodology on which their reasoning is based, and to understand more about how they exercise a professional mandate in serving the health and social care needs of a particular population.