Affordances of Multidisciplinary Team Meetings as Team-Learning Activity: A Constraints-Led Approach for Continuous Health Profession Education

TL;DR

This paper explores how multidisciplinary team meetings can be designed to improve team learning and collaboration in healthcare education.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel ecological-dynamical framework and constraints-led approach for optimizing team learning in simulated multidisciplinary team meetings.

Findings

A conceptual framework identifies constraints at three system levels that shape team learning opportunities.

Educators can use the constraints-led approach to design simulated MDTMs that promote shared cognition and interprofessional development.

The framework provides actionable principles for tailoring team-learning activities to real-world healthcare complexity.

Abstract

The complexity of modern healthcare continues to evolve, emphasizing the need for comprehensive collaboration among professionals from diverse backgrounds, patients, and their families to integrate care. Multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTMs) have emerged as an opportunity to advance interprofessional collaborative practice. However, despite their growing prevalence in clinical and educational contexts, a systematic understanding of their potential as team-learning activity remains limited. To optimize their transformative potential across both contexts, it is critical to identify factors that support team learning and to explore how MDTMs can promote interprofessional development at team and individual levels. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding team learning in MDTMs from an ecological-dynamical perspective and offers a constraints-led approach for the purposeful design and implementation of simulated MDTMs as team-learning activity in continuous health profession education. We analyze constraints at three interdependent system levels: 1) healthcare and faculty context, 2) work teams, and 3) team members, and examine how they shape opportunities for team learning. By selecting, designing, and varying relevant constraints, educators can enhance simulated MDTMs as team-learning activity, ensuring that learners share information, co-construct meaning, and engage in constructive conflict. This framework offers actionable principles for backward design, enabling educators to tailor simulated MDTMs to real-world complexity and variability. By presenting an ecological-dynamical framework and a constraints-led approach, this paper contributes to the discourse on interprofessional collaborative practice and education, leveraging the transformative potential of MDTMs to enhance integrated care, foster shared cognition, and support the development of interprofessional competence.

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