The Journal of Medical Education and Development

Introduction: The necessity of closed and continuous relationships, team work and collaboration between various health professions in treatment and care have confronted health ethics with many challenges. Inter-professional education has been proposed as an effective strategy to address this gap internationally. This study has been done to determine process of ethical growth and achieving ethical competency in health sciences students during inter-professional education.

Methods: This interpretive- integrative literature review study has been done in 2013 with integrative search in Pub med, CINHAL, Ovid, Science Direct data bases as well as Google scholar using key words including inter-professional education and ethics. All English language papers published between 2000 and 2013 were included. Of 155 retrieved articles, 15 documents were appropriate based on critical appraisal criteria and analyzed according to thematic synthesis method.. Then extracted text were entered and managed by MAXQDA software.

Results: Promotion of professional socialization process of health sciences students”, “creating a common values system” and “forming inter-professional identity” were the three main themes emerge indicating process of ethical growth in health sciences students during inter-professional education. The themes were explained by theories such as social contact, human development, transformational learning situated learning, constructivist learning and social cognitive They are the conceptual framework in inter-professional education model.

Conclusion: Inter-professional education with promotion of professional socialization process of health sciences' students, renewing and internalization of inter-professional common values and forming inter-professional identity, as complement of professional identity , empowers and enables students for effective collaboration with others. These facilitates ethical and safe performance of the graduates in clinical environments.