The IPDA conference and its usefulness for health educators
December 6, 2018
Many health care professionals may not have heard of IPDA the ‘International Professional Development Association’ – and having just collected our conference packs we read on through the programme abstracts, and are immediately drawn into a world of contemporary issues in professional education. Scanning the presenters CVs there is a predominance of ‘teachers’ and ‘teacher-educators’ and we wonder why this is? Isn’t it obvious, we ponder…, the theory of learning and evidence supporting good practice is central to the ‘teaching profession’ and their professional existence. How interesting! How does this relate to us? Will we understand complexity in learning theory? Perhaps we should take a back seat as we don’t want to be seen as pedagogically incompetent and/or incoherent!
Some positive reinforcement. Louise reminds me of her EdD and I try and recall pedagogical theory and PhD study – something to talk about! As a nurse educator I find myself musing about my own professional development and ‘positionality’, and wonder why approximately less than 10% of delegates are health professionals. Is professional development a dominant focus of the nursing profession? A Nursing and Midwifery (NMC) professional body requirement to revalidate your professional practice is a recent indicator of the professional importance of professional development, but is this just a portfolio exercise? How we learn is of course a core focus of my day job as a lecturer. I then take myself back to ‘clinical practice’ onto the hospital wards and remind myself that knowledge and skills development in nursing are immediately focused on producing successful patient outcomes, within teams of nurses and in collaboration with other health professionals. Perhaps within this holistic context there is less of a focus on ‘the nurse as educator’? However, hold on a minute, in every patient contact/encounter nurses are also educators who should reflect upon professional practice and professional standing in order to develop practice-based and academic knowledge. Still in the foyer.
What can we learn from this conference? Well lots! The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Crossing Boundaries’. The ubiquitous nature of boundaries to all professions is quickly apparent, made up but not exclusive to organisations, policy and using policy, practice, education, effective writing, teacher-student and peer-support, all of which can be explored and explained by more theories than words in this blog! Mechanisms discussed to bridge boundaries were ‘identity’, ‘complexity’ and ‘reflective practice’ which are fundamental to professional development in nursing and radiography, and recognised as good practice in university-based learning. So we are in the right place!
A good conference makes you think differently and this one was no exception. One of the things we both liked was that after the keynote speeches, there was time for round-table interdisciplinary discussion followed by a question and answer time with the keynote speaker. During these discussions, it was interesting to hear different perspectives, and to make a contribution. We often found ourselves thinking about how ideas could be adapted to practice and I hope this was a two-way process!
On Saturday Louise discussed ‘embracing creativity’ in a team of researchers which resonated across professions. As a nurse and radiographer it was great to share similar experiences and how to be successful in crossing boundaries, made more lucid by the entertaining evening drinks and meal. Thank you IPDA, we’ll hopefully be back next year and will bring some more health colleagues!
Authors: Ben Appleby (Ben.appleby@bcu.ac.uk) and Louise McKnight (louise.mcknight@bcu.ac.uk).
