Resource Center

If we are to achieve better health along the continuum of care from birth to death, we need to work across professional boundaries and better integrate the systems we have established to promote health. That was the framework that brought more than 70 thought leaders to Washington to participate in an historic, invitation-only two-day conference, “Reconnecting Public Health and Care Delivery to Improve the Health of Populations,” held May 4-5, 2014.

Medical Education in the United States and Canada is a comprehensive report to the foundation, by Abraham Flexner, on medical education in the United States and Canada, with regard to the course of study, financial aspects, medical sects, state boards, post-graduate schools, and other special forms of medical education; with descriptive and tabular accounts of all of the medical schools throughout the United States and Canada; and a general plan for reconstruction, with an introduction by the president of the foundation.

Rural America is a vital component of American society. Representing nearly 20 percent of the population, rural communities, like urban landscapes, are rich in cultural diversity.  However, the smaller, poorer, and more isolated a rural community is, the more difficult it is to ensure the availability of high-quality health services.  The Institute of Medicine report, Quality Through Collaboration: The Future of Rural Health examines the quality of health care in rural America.

In the Eigth Annual Report of the Advisory Committee on Interdisciplinary, Community-Based Linkages (ACICBL), the committee writes that health care professional shortages, insufficient numbers of faculty members, demographic changes in the rural population, a strained delivery system, and emerging health care needs affecting quality of care combine to make unprecedented demands on the rural health care system.

In 2008, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the IOM launched a two-year initiative to respond to the need to assess and transform the nursing profession. The IOM appointed the Committee on the RWJF Initiative on the Future of Nursing, at the IOM, with the purpose of producing a report that would make recommendations for an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing. Through its deliberations, the committee developed four key messages:

Every year, the Global Forum undertakes two workshops whose topics are selected by the more than 55 members of the Forum. It was decided in this first year of the Forum's existence that the workshops should lay the foundation for future work of the Forum and the topic that could best provide this base of understanding was "interprofessional education." The first workshop took place August 29-30, 2012, and the second was on November 29-30, 2012. Both workshops focused on linkages between interprofessional education (IPE) and collaborative practice.

The Center for Interprofessional Education will work collaboratively with AHC schools, colleges, centers, faculty, students and staff to identify, promote, implement and evaluate interprofessional education in a continuum of activities across the educational lifespan. The center will facilitate the creation of a vertically integrated interprofessional curriculum that leads to expected student outcomes.

From the Committee's activities, deliberations and reflections, the Committee has come to understand culture and community as differing world views, values, and languages. A lack of understanding and appreciation for these differing world views, values, and languages result in misunderstood health behaviors and inconsistent health outcomes as graduates from the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center provide health care services to an increasingly diverse population.

This is a study and evaluation of financial models, prepared by Teri Thommes and presented to Barbara Brandt, Assistant Vice President for Education and Beth Nunnally, Associate Vice President and CFO. The objective of this Academic Health Center project is to assimilate the background information necessary to develop an improved model for fairly distributing resources and costs associated with interprofessional, interdisciplinary and cross-collegiate teaching efforts.

Over the past 12 months, a large group of faculty from the AHC colleges/schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, and public health engaged in deliberate planning efforts to identify and plan intercollegiate primary care education activities and curricular planning.