Lifestyle and social factors account for 80% of overall health status. Addressing the complexities of health requires coordinated and interprofessional practice. Thus, identifying interprofessional education approaches in the health sciences is an important step in preparing future health professionals. The aim of this dissertation, consisting of three studies, was to add to the literature in occupational therapy and interprofessional education which is lacking in methodology and results of interprofessional approaches to teach social determinants of health.

In the first study a systematic review of the literature explored the influence of occupational therapy in addressing population health outcomes in intervention. Results highlighted high evidence for lifestyle-based interventions aiming to address social participation and weight loss. Additional findings highlighted important roles for occupational therapy professionals to influence health outcomes, although several themes produced few studies to adequately draw enough conclusions.

Study two aimed to develop learning materials, emphasizing the social determinants of health, appropriate for use in interprofessional education. Expert content reviewers were recruited to provide input to improve the quality of the case. Most of the reviewers (64%) strongly agreed that social factors were a key component of the case if it was to be used for interdisciplinary education, χ² (3, N=10) =10.8, p =.01. The applicability of the case to interprofessional education of health science students was ranked high.

The content developed in study two was implement in an interprofessional education event. The process and outcomes of this study are provided in study three. A two-armed RCT was carried out with students (n=408) from 16 health science programs. The aim was to compare the use of an existing case study with the case from study two. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed no significant main effect of using the experimental case for the outcomes of teamwork roles and responsibilities, bias, or social determinants of health. For both groups, the awareness of the social determinants of health improved. Findings indicate that case studies can be used to increase knowledge of social determinants of health, although student interaction during interprofessional education may be more important than content alone.