Twelve tips to promote interprofessional workplace learning for medical trainees

Medical trainees need guidance from more experienced individuals to help them engage in and learn from clinical practice. While supervising physicians often serve as guides, many additional health professionals (HPs) routinely interact with trainees. These HPs can offer guidance, contributing to trainees’ development of physician competence and collaborative skills. However, trainees may overlook HPs as an educational resource and HPs may not be fully aware of their educational influence or empowered to contribute to workplace learning. As a result, interprofessional workplace guidance and the accompanying learning opportunities can be easily missed without intentional support. This article presents twelve practical tips informed by theory and empirical work to promote interprofessional workplace learning by engaging medical trainees, supervising physicians, HPs, and medical education programs. Tips for trainees call for expanded learning goals and sources for workplace guidance. Tips for supervising physicians provide strategies to model, broker, and legitimize interprofessional learning. Tips for HPs highlight how to augment their current influence on trainees in the workplace. Finally, tips for educational program leaders outline structural actions to empower HPs as part of the workplace educational team.