Shared understanding and task-interdependence in nursing interns’ collaborative relations: A social network study of vocational health care internships in the Netherlands

Shared understanding among collaborators is a key element of delivering successful interprofessional care and a main challenge for professional education concerns nurturing such understanding among students. We assessed how nursing students perceived different levels of shared understanding in their collaborations with others in clinical internships. We analyse the collaborative networks of interns to examine whether individual factors (attitudes, perceptions of collaborative cultures, and motivation) or relational factors among collaborators (task-interdependence, cooperation frequency, and interprofessional and hierarchical roles) affect shared understanding among 150 Dutch nursing interns and their collaborators (n = 865). Theoretically, we stress the importance of focusing on collaborative relations in interprofessional care settings. Multilevel models distinguish two levels in explaining the variation in shared understanding, nesting collaborative relationships within individuals. Results indicate merely 37.4% of found variation of shared understanding could be attributed to individual-level factors (variation between interns), while 62.6% of variation is found within interns, showing that shared understanding differs substantially between the collaborations one intern engages in. Multilevel models reveal that task-interdependence strongly predicts shared understanding in inter- and intraprofessional collaborations. We conclude that focusing on collaborative relations is essential to foster shared understanding in vocational internship programmes, and that health care organisations should pay explicit attention to task-interdependence in interns’ collaborations.