Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Eigth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 18-20, 1986 at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

An evaluation of the Commission on Interprofessional Education and Practice at the Ohio State University's overall efforts suggested that the apparent relationship between overall mission and the courses taught in the program might be further explored. The evaluator posed a number of questions about the courses and their interrelationship, that is, the coherence of the courses as a curriculum. The questions include the following:

• How do courses interrelate and how should they interrelate?
• How well does the present configuration of courses serve the Commission's educational objectives?
• Do clinical education concepts dominate the curriculum?
• Is there a problem of focus in courses with complex subject matter?
• Is enough being done about the exposure and reduction of interprofessional stereotypes?

The valuative questions provided opportunity to examine the Commission's courses from several perspectives, including issues of content and issues of process. The elective nature of the courses and the varying academic schedules of the participating units present immediate problems in thinking of the curriculum as an articulating set of courses. That is, a student may elect to enroll in only one course, or may enroll in several. For students who wish to enroll in more than one course, no particular sequence is prescribed. Nor are there prerequisite courses, although students are usually expected to be enrolled in one of the participating academic units. With this brief description of the elective, non-sequential character of the Commission's course offerings, the differences between the usual prescribed curriculum for professional preparation in any of the participating units and the Commission's curriculum become apparent. We will examine both content and process approaches to interprofessional course work. We will review objectives in both areas, that is, those which address traditional didactic sorts of information and those which can be termed process because they have to do with hands on or simulated experiences, these objectives will be drawn from recent course syllabi.