Participants

An interprofessional group of students (n = 75) were recruited from: the first two years of the University of Toronto MD program (n = 31), a fourth-year undergraduate pre-clinical service-learning course with students of mixed degree backgrounds (n = 18), the first year of master’s level occupational therapy (n = 6), physical therapy (n = 6) and speech-language pathology (n = 10), and one student from dentistry, pharmacy, physiotherapy assistant, and radiation therapy programs (n = 4). We chose pre-clinical and early year students to minimize the amount of formal health professions education and clinical practice exposure they would have had.

Participants were assigned to sixteen groups of five, ensuring a multiprofessional complement of students per group to enable interprofessional learning. Eight groups were randomly assigned to the control condition and eight to the intervention condition. We began the study with 80 participants but five participants—2 from the control condition and 3 from the intervention condition—dropped out prior to participation due to factors external to the study (e.g. weather conditions).