Since one of the aims of this meeting is to create a strategy for the participants to connect and share experiences post-conference I will start by giving a very brief account of Jönköping University and the School of Health Sciences, this in order to give you a sense of the school as a possible partner for collaboration. Then I will describe how teachers work to increase knowledge with regard to health care improvement within the nursing program. Thereafter I will talk about a research project and relate this to what we can learn about interprofessional education. The basic values regarding health care improvement described by Paul Batalden and his colleagues are central to our present development. We share the theoretical assumptions concerning the Clinical Microsystem and the view of redesigning health care education in order to produce the best care for the patient and his/her family. So within our organization both teachers and students — like nurses — have two jobs, one of which is to bring about improvement. So we have started the process where the educators need to change their teaching for the sake of better patient outcomes, better system performance, and better professional development. This means communicating not only the existing evidence-based knowledge but also improvement knowledge which involves a substantial shift in our idea of the work of health care — a challenging task that can benefit from the use of a wide variety of tools and methods. A key concern for us in the planning of our different programs is that the improvement of knowledge shall permeate the education and contribute to establishing a professional attitude marked by daily inspiration to produce the best care. The basic education involves four stages. First there is an introduction to concepts and models in health care improvement. This content is in the first semester.  Second the students’ are making a personal improvement in their everyday life. The students apply PDSA-cycle for improvement of an issue, commonly their time-table for studies, time spending for eating breakfast in the morning or eating habits in general. The third stage involves evidence-based nursing and systematic literature reviews and in the fourth stage, the students make health care improvements in collaboration with the staff during a clinical training period. The nurses at the clinic formulate the area of improvement. Then the students work systematically in pairs to collect data and the results are reported to the nurses. The latter stage is a new content in nursing education but we know from occupational therapy that the staff appreciated these works and the results were in most cases used by the staff in their job.

The overall aim of the research project “Bridging the gaps” is to generate evidence about the process and outcome of clinical work within the area of quality improvement. The project contributes to an advanced environment for learning and innovation, research and development in the field of health-care management and improvement. There are 14 doctoral students at the research school, who takes part in the research project. Three of them are nurses and doctoral students at the School of Health Sciences. All PhD students have to take two compulsory courses, one is named “Bridging the gaps — a multidisciplinary research field” and the other is named “Interactive Research Methodology”. The Microsystem as a theoretical model is included in the mention research course “Bridging the gaps” and in each doctoral student’s research proposal. The PhD students shall work together with health-care staff by way of an interactive research method. This means that there is an integration of research and practice. The PhD students and the health-care staff are working together throughout the project. The staff is involved at every stage, from designing the improvement work, formulating the research questions to reporting the results. Research with this methodology generates knowledge of great relevance for clinical practice.