How do we understand the determinants of health? An exploration of distributed knowledge and interprofessional health sciences education

It is acknowledged that interprofessional communication and teamwork are foundational for high-quality, safe medical practice. The theory of distributed knowledge posits that each person has unique knowledge and experiences that can contribute to a broader group perspective. Patient care can be positively influenced by a robust and interprofessionally shared understanding of the complexities of health and illness. One would expect a variety of perspectives to be evident in all healthcare providers, including incoming health science students from different professional fields. To examine this notion, medical, nursing, and pharmacy students (n = 24) at the start of an interprofessional training experience were asked to write an essay on factors that contribute to health and/or illness. Their essays were thematically coded to generate a list of factors considered key to health/illness and compare responses across fields to better understand how knowledge is distributed across entering learners. Results show that students from different professional backgrounds emphasise some shared and some divergent factors. This distributed knowledge can be a rich source of understanding and shared thinking across professions. It is also a critical source of individual power to contribute to the construction of an ongoing, collaborative discourse about health.