Doctors, Nurses and Pharmacists Learn Apart but Must Work Together, Turkish Study Finds

Modern healthcare is a team sport, yet most health professional students train as if they will practise alone. A new qualitative study from Türkiye has examined how the people closest to the problem—faculty members who teach future doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists and dietitians, and the final-year students about to enter the workforce—actually think about interprofessional collaboration, teamwork and the boundaries between professional roles. The findings, published in BMC Medical Education, paint a picture of widespread agreement that collaboration is essential for safe, patient-centred care, combined with frustration that the structures needed to teach it remain underdeveloped.

The research team, led by Bürge Atılgan of Ankara Training and Research Hospital and Sevgi Turan of ADA University in Baku, conducted the study across five universities in Ankara. Their goal was deliberately broad: rather than measuring collaboration with surveys and scales, they wanted to understand how educators and students experience and interpret it in their own words. Qualitative descriptive methodology was chosen precisely because the field needed a richer, more textured account of what collaboration means on the ground in Turkish health professions education, where such in-depth evidence has been scarce.

The study design was substantial. Forty-seven faculty members took part in semi-structured individual interviews, while thirty-five final-year students participated in five profession-specific focus groups. Participants were recruited from five disciplines: medicine, nursing, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, pharmacy, and nutrition and dietetics. Every interview was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and the researchers analysed the transcripts using qualitative content analysis, a systematic method for identifying patterns and themes within textual data. Reporting followed the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, a thirty-two-item checklist designed to make qualitative studies transparent and replicable. Ethical approval came from the Hacettepe University Ethics Committee, with institutional permissions from every participating university, and all participants gave informed consent.

From the analysis, four major themes emerged. The first framed collaborative practice as a requirement for patient-centred care. Participants across all professions agreed that safe, coordinated and holistic treatment depends on professionals working together rather than in parallel silos. A patient with complex needs—say, an older adult recovering from a stroke—requires physicians to diagnose, nurses to monitor, physiotherapists to restore mobility, pharmacists to manage medication interactions and dietitians to address nutrition. When these professionals communicate poorly, care fragments; when they collaborate, outcomes improve. The participants saw this not as an idealistic aspiration but as a practical necessity of contemporary medicine.

The second theme concerned understanding professional roles and boundaries. Participants emphasised that effective teamwork is impossible without role clarity: each team member must know not only what their own responsibilities are, but what their colleagues are trained and authorised to do. Misunderstandings about scope of practice breed duplication, gaps in care and mistrust. The researchers found that both faculty members and students recognised the importance of mutual respect alongside role clarity, but that students often lacked structured opportunities to learn what other professions actually do—a gap that leaves them to form impressions through incidental contact, rumour or stereotype.

The third theme identified communication, hierarchy and prejudice as the principal barriers to teamwork. This is where the study becomes most pointed. Participants described steep professional hierarchies in which the voice of the physician traditionally carries the most weight, and in which other professionals may hesitate to speak up even when they have crucial information. Prejudice between professions—unflattering assumptions about what another discipline contributes—further corrodes trust. These barriers are not unique to Türkiye; international literature on interprofessional collaboration has long documented similar dynamics. But the study makes clear that students experience these tensions directly during clinical placements, and that unaddressed hierarchy in training environments risks reproducing itself in the next generation of practitioners.

The fourth theme centred on educational and institutional contexts for collaboration. Here the two participant groups diverged in revealing ways. Although faculty members and students raised many of the same issues, they approached them from different positions. Students focused mainly on learning, participation, communication and respect—their immediate experience of being trained and of interacting with other professions. Faculty members, by contrast, placed greater emphasis on professional identity, institutional structures and the practical conditions required for implementation. In other words, students asked how they could learn to collaborate, while educators asked what curricular time, faculty development and administrative support would be needed to make such learning possible at scale.

That divergence matters for policy. Interprofessional education—the deliberate arrangement of students from two or more professions to learn together—has been championed by the World Health Organization and the Interprofessional Education Collaborative as a strategy for building collaborative practice. Yet embedding it in a curriculum is institutionally demanding. It requires synchronised timetables across faculties, shared learning activities with genuine clinical relevance, assessment methods that reward teamwork, and faculty who can model collaborative behaviour in front of students. The study’s participants made clear that faculty role modelling is a powerful force: students learn as much from watching how their teachers interact with other professionals as from any formal lecture on teamwork.

The authors’ conclusions are measured but firm. Faculty members and final-year students viewed collaborative practice and understanding of professional roles as important but insufficiently structured components of health professions education. They recommend that curricula provide early, repeated and interactive opportunities for students from different professions to learn together—early, because attitudes and stereotypes form quickly; repeated, because a single shared course cannot undo years of siloed training; and interactive, because collaboration is a skill practised, not memorised. They further call for faculty development programmes and institutional support to sustain collaborative learning and practice over time, recognising that individual enthusiasm cannot substitute for structural commitment.

The study was supported by the Hacettepe University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit under project number TDK-2020-18494, with the funder having no role in study design, data collection, analysis or interpretation. The authors declare no competing interests, and the article is published open access under a Creative Commons licence. For a health system facing rising chronic disease, ageing populations and increasingly complex care pathways, the message resonates far beyond Ankara: the professionals of tomorrow will inevitably work in teams, and the education system must stop leaving teamwork to chance. Teaching students to collaborate deliberately, with clear roles and mutual respect, may prove as consequential to patient safety as any drug or device.

Subject of Research: Interprofessional collaboration and professional role perceptions in health professions education in Türkiye

Article Title: Faculty members’ and final-year students’ perspectives on interprofessional collaboration and professional roles: a qualitative study in Türkiye

Article References: Atılgan, B., & Turan, S. (2026). Faculty members’ and final-year students’ perspectives on interprofessional collaboration and professional roles: a qualitative study in Türkiye. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10512-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10512-3

Keywords: interprofessional collaboration, health professions education, teamwork, professional roles, qualitative research, medical education, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, nutrition and dietetics, Türkiye, curriculum