Collective work and team dynamics in an innovative multi-cohort community health course for pharmacy students in Montreal

This article aims at describing and analysing the way in which pharmacy students work together in the context of an innovative course on community health. The article uses content analysis of two focus groups held in 2015 with 14 students from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Université de Montréal. The course included the problematisation, design and completion of an intervention project, and offered an interesting lens to explore team-based learning and project-based learning. More specifically, this article allows us to describe and understand the ways students collaborate together: collective work, task distribution, applied work strategies and their justifications. This study also allowed to discuss factors both limiting and promoting the development of skills to work in a team, the specific added value of a community health course for developing skills associated with teamwork for future health professionals. Finally, the pharmacist's community role as health professional seems to be revealed and even reinforced by completing such a course. Indeed, this course allows for the learning of fundamental values of professionalism for students, such as leadership, equality and responsibility.