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. 2024 Oct;25(4):2657-2671.
doi: 10.1177/15248380231221279. Epub 2024 Jan 28.

Interprofessional Education in Child Protection for Preservice Health and Allied Health Professionals: A Scoping Review

Lauren Elizabeth Lines  1 , Tracy Alexis Kakyo  1 , Helen McLaren  2 , Megan Cooper  1 , Nina Sivertsen  1   3 , Alison Hutton  4   5 , Lana Zannettino  2 , Rebecca Starrs  2 , Donna Hartz  6   7 , Shannon Brown  8 , Julian Grant  9
Affiliations

Interprofessional Education in Child Protection for Preservice Health and Allied Health Professionals: A Scoping Review

Lauren Elizabeth Lines et al. Trauma Violence Abuse. 2024 Oct.

Abstract

Health and allied health professionals are uniquely positioned to collaborate in prevention, early intervention and responses to child maltreatment. Effective collaboration requires comprehensive interprofessional education (IPE), and inadequate collaboration across sectors and professions continually contributes to poor outcomes for children. Little is known about what interprofessional preparation health and allied health professionals receive before initial qualification (preservice) that equips them for interprofessional collaboration and provision of culturally safe care in child protection. This scoping review aimed to identify what is known internationally about IPE in child protection for preservice health and allied health professionals. Thirteen manuscripts reporting 12 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the synthesis. Key characteristics of the educational interventions are presented, including target disciplines, core content and their learning objectives and activities. Findings demonstrated primarily low-quality methodologies and educational interventions that had not been replicated beyond their initial context. Many educational interventions did not provide comprehensive content covering the spectrum of prevention, early intervention and responses for all types of child maltreatment, and/or did not clearly indicate how IPE was achieved. Key challenges to delivering comprehensive interprofessional child protection include lack of institutional support and competing priorities across disciplines who must meet requirements of separate regulatory bodies. Consequently, there is a need for further development and robust evaluation of educational interventions to explore how interprofessional collaborative skills for child protection can be developed and delivered in preservice health and allied health professional education.

Keywords: allied health professional; child protection; health professional; interprofessional education; scoping review.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
PRISMA flow chart.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Focus of learning objectives of the educational interventions (n = 12).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Timeline of selected papers and similar works.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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