Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 9-11, 1993 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of a federally funded program that has focused on increasing the knowledge and attitudes of students in the health professions toward ambulatory chronic care. The project was funded through the Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of Health Professions, under the Model Education Program. The Ohio State University's College of Medicine was funded for three years to bring together health professionals, educators, and community practitioners to create and implement an interdisciplinary educational program in ambulatory chronic care. The program was planned to address three problems:

1. the need to provide students with more experience with ambulatory patients with chronic illnesses;
2. the need to develop new, non-traditional interdisciplinary training sites; and
3. the difficulty of Introducing new experiences into crowded health professions curricula.