BACKGROUND: The goal of interprofessional practice experiences in health professions programs is to develop interprofessional collaborative practice skills.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the study was to explore the meaning final-semester Bachelor of Science in Nursing students attributed to interprofessional practice experiences during clinical immersion.
METHODS: The theoretical framework for this descriptive qualitative study was experiential learning theory. A sample of 12 participants was drawn from final-semester prelicensure Bachelor of Science in Nursing students at a college of nursing at a public research university. Data were collected through one-on-one semi-structured interviews and analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.
RESULTS: The analysis yielded four themes: professional and interprofessional identity, working with team members, communication practices, and trusting relationships. Patterns across themes were clinical environment culture, nursing school preparation, nurse preceptor role, fear/concern/worry, and night shift.
CONCLUSIONS: Consistency in preceptors, welcoming clinical environments, and opportunities to practice communicating with team members contributed to interprofessional collaborative practice skill development and improved perceptions of readiness for practice. Academic and clinical educators may use findings to (a) identify immersion placements for interprofessional practice experiences, (b) design curricula reflective of interprofessional practice, (c) advance teaching strategies to promote interprofessional practice, and (d) create learning environments that aid in professional and interprofessional identity formation.

UNASSIGNED: Clinical immersion experiences provide engineering students with opportunities to identify unmet user needs and to interact with clinical professionals. These experiences have become common features of undergraduate biomedical engineering curricula, with many published examples in the literature. There are, however, few or no published studies that describe rigorous qualitative analysis of biomedical engineering student reflections from immersion programs.
UNASSIGNED: Fifteen reflection prompts that align with program learning goals were developed and structured based on the DEAL model for critical reflection. Undergraduate participants in a summer immersion program responded to these prompts throughout five weeks of clinical rotations. Data from two summer cohorts of participants (n = 20) were collected, and thematic analysis was performed to characterize student responses.
UNASSIGNED: Students reported learning about key healthcare topics, such as medical insurance, access to healthcare (and lack thereof), stakeholder perspectives, and key medical terminology and knowledge. Most reflections also noted that students could apply newly gained medical knowledge to biomedical engineering design. Further, clinical immersion provided students with a realistic view of the biomedical engineering profession and potential areas for future professional growth, with many reflections identifying the ability to communicate with a variety of professionals as key to student training. Some students reflected on conversations with patients, noting that these interactions reinvigorated their passion for the biomedical engineering field. Finally, 63% of student reflections identified instances in which patients of low socioeconomic status were disadvantaged in health care settings.
UNASSIGNED: Clinical immersion programs can help close the gap between academic learning and the practical experience demands of the field, as design skills and product development experience are becoming increasingly necessary for biomedical engineers. Our work initiates efforts toward more rigorous analysis of students\' reactions and experiences, particularly around socioeconomic and demographic factors, which may provide guidance for continuous improvement and development of clinical experiences for biomedical engineers.