Interdisciplinary Education: What, Why, and When?

For the past 30 years, there have been many noted health care leaders advocating the implementation of interdisciplinary coursework in the health professions. Improved patient/ client care, effective communications among the health care team and increasing efficiency in patient/client care are reasons for considering this direction. Successful interdisciplinary teams with documented positive outcomes include pain management, end-of-life care, palliative care, oncology and geriatrics. However, there are few academic programs that include interdisciplinary education experiences as pan of their curricula. A tension exists between the need to teach the specialized content unique to each profession and to teach the necessary skills for successful collaboration and teamwork. This lecture will address both the need and the barriers to implementing interdisciplinary educational opportunities. Successful interdisciplinary education programs will be used to illustrate that small changes in curricula can lead to measurable long-term improvements in providing quality health care and increased job satisfaction. I am so honored today to give the Pauline Cerasoli Lecture and, from the bottom of my heart, I thank the Education section of APTA, for selecting me as this year's lecturer. I also thank my dear friends Ruth Purtilo and Lee Nelson for nominating me. Preparing for this lecture has been a personal journey for me-exploring a topic that I am passionate about as an educator-and I often wonder why it's so hard to make substantive progress on teaching in a truly interprofessional atmosphere. Before I share my ideas with you, let's all think a little about Polly. She was passionate about advancing the profession of physical therapy and was a risk-taker. Although change used to make her nervous and somewhat uncomfortable, Polly would overcome her discomfort if she believed in a new idea. She was a believer in interdisciplinary education, but as director of the Physical Therapy Department at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) she often experienced the tension of advocating for more physical therapy resources, versus playing as a team member. However, when she fought these battles, she did it with professionalism, humor, and compassion. As many of you know, Polly was both a colleague and a personal friend. We worked together in the early days of the founding of the MGH Institute of Health Professions. One of the earliest parts of the mission statement was to educate students to practice in an interdisciplinary manner as well as to prepare leaders in the health care disciplines, including specialists in the various health professions. These goals were considered radical in those days, as it was the mid 1970s when the Institute was chartered and planning began. Polly was working on her doctorate in education at that time and her fellow classmates included health professionals from occupational therapy, nursing, dietetics, and social work. She experienced firsthand how learning together can help break down misperceptions of the roles of each others' professions and, from that experience, she enthusiastically developed (along with Nancy Watts) an interdisciplinary course in leadership for postprofessional students from nursing, dietetics, social work, and physical therapy. The course was taught in seminar format based on real clinical scenarios that the students were experiencing in their clinical day jobs. Polly's role was to help the students understand leadership theories that could help improve their leadership skills-theories such as locus of control and discussing other documented leadership styles were the foci of the course. To make a long story short, this course was successful but was eventually dropped as a course offering, mainly because specialized curricula developed and there was little room for students to take electives. So with reluctance, we dropped the requirement that students, in order to graduate, must take at least two interdisciplinary courses. …