The Partnered Learning Project
IPC Team Resource Kit:
An Aid to Designing and Implementing Interprofessional Collaboration Workshops for Clinical Healthcare Teams
5.0 Facilitator’s Guide
Process | Materials | Experience/Lessons | Ongoing Challenges
The Facilitator’s Guide was critical documentation for ensuring successful facilitation of the workshops. Once established, the Guide served as a template for the customization of all subsequent workshops. The Guide helped focus planning discussions, even when the three facilitators were unable to meet or talk in person. During the workshop, the Guide supported a co-ordinated yet flexible delivery. It also proved useful for the facilitators to evaluate the workshop after the event, comparing the planned directions with the actual experience.
The Guide was also instrumental in helping other research team members who had not attended one of the workshops to better understand the IPC curriculum. And finally, the Facilitator’s Guide provided sufficient detail so that another facilitator would have been able to facilitate the workshop with little notice if an emergency had prevented the scheduled facilitator from attending. Given the challenge of organizing team attendance at these workshops, last minute cancellation would have been very undesirable.
- The process of jointly developing the Facilitator’s Guide helped PLP facilitators, who had not previously worked together, to create a shared understanding of the proposed learning goals and methodologies.
- The detailed facilitator’s script helped keep the workshop on schedule, while still enabling the co-facilitators to allow the participants flexibility in directing the discussion.
- Producing a customized Facilitator’s Guide for each workshop proved instrumental in the workshop design process. The task of customizing each workshop guide ensured detailed communication among the facilitators and role play specialist about the learning objectives, learning opportunities and options that could arise, and what we understood about the individual team’s culture and current collaborative practices.
- The Facilitator’s Guide, customized for each workshop, was only shared with the facilitator’s and the role play expert (standardized healthcare professional). The Guide included timing and directional guides, action prompts, and leading discussion questions.
Experience / Lessons
Advantages of developing and using a detailed facilitator’s package included:
- Another facilitator could step in at the last minute and run the session if need be,
- Ensuring a shared an understanding of the learning goals and the various presenter roles in each workshop component, enhancing the ability of the facilitator’s to smoothly work together
- Enabling the facilitators to permit significant flexibility in how group discussion unfolded, while still attending to time management, linking group discussion to the core curriculum, and ensuring all key learning points were covered.
- Delivering workshops to different units and in different organizations necessitated customization of the workshop design and guide for each unique environment. To accomplish this, resources needed to be anticipated and made available for each revision.
