Affordances of Multidisciplinary Team Meetings for the Development of Interprofessional Competency: A Constraints-led Framework for Education and Training

The complexity of modern healthcare continues to evolve, emphasizing the need for comprehensive collaboration among care providers across diverse disciplines and professions with patients and their families to integrate care. Multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTMs) have emerged as an opportunity to advance efficient and effective interprofessional collaborative practice. Despite their growing prevalence in clinical and educational contexts, clear definitions and a systematic understanding of MDTMs remain limited. To optimize the educational and training potential of MDTMs, it is critical to identify factors that support team learning and to explore how MDTMs can promote interprofessional growth. This paper introduces a constraints-led framework for the purposeful design and implementation of MDTMs in health profession education. We analyze constraints at three interdependent dimensions—healthcare setting, work teams, and team members—and examine how they shape team learning behaviors and processes for interprofessional competency development. By selecting, designing and varying relevant constraints, educators and care providers can enhance MDTMs as both collaborative spaces and learning environments, ensuring that they effectively support clinical decision-making, knowledge integration, and interprofessional development. This framework offers actionable principles for backward design, enabling MDTMs to be tailored to real-world complexity and variability. Thereby, this paper advances the discourse on interprofessional collaborative practice and education. It provides a foundation for future research and practice, ensuring MDTMs remain adaptive, efficient, and effective in preparing current and future care providers for the demands of integrated care in complex healthcare.