Series editors abstract:

A key goal of this book series is to contribute to discussions about and processes for improving the enactment of occupational capacities through professional practice- based experiences. A related goal is associated with understanding and enhancing the contributions that different kinds of experiences can make to the formation and continuity of those occupational practices. The volumes in this series have contrib- uted a range of perspectives, approaches and outcomes to these discussions. This volume continues that tradition through considerations of how simulation-based activities can contribute to enhancing occupational practices in which working and learning progresses inter- and intra-professionally within healthcare settings. The procedural concern here is to enhance patient safety through improving the quality of collaborative working and learning by healthcare workers. The conceptual concern here is to understand how such working and learning can be understood more fully as a process of interdependence amongst practitioners, and how such co- working and learning progresses, in what ways and for what outcomes. Added here are the ways in which technology comes to mediate and support that process. Perhaps only through such considerations, focused empirical work and detailed analysis will our understanding of human capacities, their enactment and evaluation transcend from either wholly individualised or wholly socialised accounts.

The sections comprising this book are drawn from a large collaborative study hosted by three institutions that have longer and solid traditions of making contribu- tions to understanding the development of professional capacities through interpro- fessional practices (i.e. Linkoping), dedicated focuses on improving healthcare practices (Karolinska) and the use of technology in working and learning (Gothenburg). These collaborations have been informed and enriched by contribu- tors from other institutions who bring explanatory concepts. The attempt to utilise, accommodate and optimise these different contributions is exercised within the organisation of the sections of the book and chapters within it, highlighted by a process of dual considerations and separate commentaries. Each of these sections provides an overview, statements about procedural matters (e.g. how to conduct inquiries or how to analyse data), proposing and advancing particular explanatory accounts, and also offering perspectives on how educational or work practice might be enhanced. This structuring is particularly helpful as it provides focused consid- erations of particular phenomena (e.g. team-based approaches to simulation, use of video recordings, doing simulations) through description, analysis and commentary.

In these ways, this volume offers contributions to discussions about the goals for, processes of and outcomes of professional and practice-based learning in a manner that is highly consistent with the ambitions of this book series.