Co-designing and co-facilitating health professional education with people who have lived experience of health conditions creates authentic and meaningful opportunities for student learning. In 2024, the Interprofessional Parkinson’s Workshop for medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech pathology students was implemented at the University of Tasmania and is running in its third iteration this year. Co-design is the central tenant of the workshop, with the session being co-designed and co-facilitated by both people with lived experience of Parkinson’s disease or lived experience of caring for someone with Parkinson’s disease (PwLE), and by local clinicians.

The Interprofessional Parkinson’s Workshop addresses research by Anderson et al. (2025) which reports that service users and PwLE have not been sufficiently involved in designing or delivering entry to practice interprofessional education initiatives. To ensure that the design of the workshop was deeply informed by contemporary evidence, best-practice frameworks were applied during the design process including the Think Local Act Personal ladder of co-design (Think Local Act Personal, 2026) and the Patient Engagement in Research Plan (Hamilton et al., 2018). Pedagogical best practice was also at the forefront of the design. The workshop intended to increase students’ knowledge and understanding of Parkinson’s and extend students’ interprofessional collaborative practice capabilities. The session learning outcomes are aligned with an Interprofessional Capability Framework (Brewer et al., 2013), with a focus on role clarification, reflective practice, person-centred care, interprofessional communication, and collaborative practice.

Our approach to engaging with both PwLE stakeholders and local clinicians during the co-design and workshop delivery strived to dismantle any potential preconceived notions of the health professional being the ‘expert’. Rather, a collaborative approach, where the person receiving healthcare is placed at the centre of the care team, in line with the recommendations for best practice Parkinson’s care by Bloem et al. (2021), was adopted during the workshop. This evidence-based approach was used to highlight the vital importance of the lived experience, was used to model a collaborative approach to healthcare interactions, and was used to model patient-centred care to the students in the room. Following the workshop, a medical student spoke to one of the facilitators and said that ‘now I know why allied health needs to be involved in discharge planning’.

Initial results from the pilot evaluation (Martin et al., manuscript under review), show that of those who attended and were eligible, 92.7% (77/83) were recruited to the research survey. Following the workshop, students reported that they gained an awareness of the skills various professions specialised in, in addition to common skills and roles required of all health professionals. One such role was advocating within the healthcare system to improve care for PwLE. The opportunity that the Interprofessional Parkinson’s Workshop provides, for learners to develop their interprofessional identity (i.e., their shared roles) in group-based learning environments, aligns with socialisation theory (Tajfel et al., 1986). The socialisation theory relates to the interprofessional socialisation framework, which aims to support educators in the development of health professional students’ dual identities, these being their interprofessional identity and their professional identity (Khalili et al., 2013).

The novel element of this workshop, captured by the research evaluation, is the opportunity for meaningful engagement of PwLE in health professional education and the opportunity for students to socialise with PwLE in an interprofessional setting. Please contact Dr Romany Martin (romany.martin@utas.edu.au; School of Health Sciences, University of Tasmania) for any further information about the project, or if interested in collaboration.

References:

Anderson, E. S., Bennett-Weston, A., and Ford, J. S. (2025). Where is the voice of lived experience in interprofessional education? A scoping review. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2025.2452977

Bloem, B. R., Okun, M. S., and Klein, C. (2021). Parkinson's disease. The Lancet, 397(10291), 2284–2303. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00218-X

Brewer, M. L., and Jones, S. (2013). An interprofessional practice capability framework focusing on safe, high-quality, client-centred health service. Journal of Allied Health, 42(2), 45E-49E.

Hamilton, C., Hoens, A., Backman, C., English, K., McKinnon, A., McQuitty, S., and Li, L. (2018). Workbook to guide the development of a Patient Engagement In Research (PEIR) Plan. Arthritis Research Canada. The University of British Columbia. Accessed on 19 August 2025. Accessed from https://www.arthritisresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/PEIR-Plan-Guide.pdf

Khalili, H., Orchard, C., Laschinger, H. K., and Farah, R. (2013). An interprofessional socialization framework for developing an interprofessional identity among health professions students. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 27(6), 448–453. https://doi.org/10.3109/13561820.2013.804042

Martin, R., Berndt, A., Teare, C., Bird, M-L., Lawton, J., Ogden, K., Radford, J., Moyle, B., and Cartwright, J. (2026). Co-designing an interprofessional Parkinson’s workshop: A pilot evaluation of a standalone teaching and learning intervention for medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, and speech pathology students. Focus on Health Professional Education. Manuscript under review.

Tajfel, H., and Turner, J.C. (1986). The social identity theory of inter-group behavior. In S. Worchel and L.W. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 276-293). Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Accessed on 19 August 2025. Accessed from: https://www.christosaioannou.com/Tajfel%20and%20Turner%201986.pdf

Think Local Act Personal. (2026). Co-production: It's a long-term relationship. Accessed on 12 June 2026. Accessed from: https://thinklocalactpersonal.org.uk/resources/ladder-of-co-production/