Taking aim at interdisciplinary education for continuous improvement in health care.

Over the last 30 years, nursing faculty have achieved varying levels of success in their efforts to engage in interdisciplinary education. To sharpen the focus, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement sponsored a national demonstration project in which nursing faculty from four universities participated. THE CONTINUALLY EVOLVING health care system is placing new demands on health professionals and on the educational programs that produce those professionals. In 1991, the Pew Health Professions education, based on the premise that "health professionals can be educated not only to contribute and thrive in a different environment but also to help in changing the system for the better" (Clare & Richardson, 1991). To this end, the Commission identified core competencies that practitioners of the future will need. These competencies include the ability to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams, with sufficient understanding of the health care system "to continuously improve the operations and accountability of that system" (Shugars, O'Neil, & Bader, 1991). Integrated, interdisciplinary teamwork and continuous improvement of professional work and the health care system were reaffirmed in subsequent reports from the Commission (O'Niel, 1993; Pew Health Professions Commission, 1995). More recently, the Advisory Panel on Health Professions Education and Managed Care for the Pew Health Professions Commission advised that health professions education programs "teach students to participate in continuous quality improvement," "teach the knowledge, skills and values needed for effective teamwork," and "develop administrative structures conducive to interdisciplinary teaching and learning" (Tresolini et al., 1995). The challenge is to reform health professions curricula to prepare students to work in interdisciplinary teams, engage in data-driven decision making in their daily practice, and improve patient care processes in order to improve the health of the individuals and populations they serve. These national recommendations have challenged health professions educators to move beyond traditional discipline-bound educational models to future-oriented interdisciplinary teaching/learning models. Recognizing a need for leadership to move this agenda forward, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), a not-for-profit organization created to help lead the continuous improvement of the quality and value of health care systems, initiated the Interdisciplinary Professional Education Collaborative (IPEC) in 1994. One of IHI's four target areas for improvement is interdisciplinary health professions education. To address this issue, a planning group of faculty leaders from nursing, medicine, and health administration was convened by IHI, and, with IHI's support, subsequently created IPEC. The framework of a "collaborative" was selected because of its focus on bringing different groups and institutions together in a shared learning community to work toward a common aim (Headrick et al., 1996). According to Headrick and colleagues (1996), a collaborative "creates an infrastructure in which groups working on parallel pilot projects can share successes, learn from one another's failures, share resources, and teach one another." A request for proposals was sent to 57 faculty leaders in nursing, medicine, and health administrative who were interested or already involved in integrating continuous improvement in health professions curricula, and doing so in interdisciplinary framework. Criteria for selecting groups to participate in the three-year demonstrative project included: commitment to and prior practice or teaching experience in continuous improvement, involvement of at least three target disciplines (nursing, medicine, and health administration), and agreement to commit institutional resources for core support for the IPEC and for local activities. Four proposals met these criteria and were selected as demonstration sites for the three-year project: * Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University-Cleveland State University, * Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Allegheny University (formerly Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University) and La Salle University; Allegheny General Hospital and Duquesne and Carnegie-Mellon Universities (project sponsored by the Allegheny Health Education and Research Foundation), * Charleston, South Carolina: Medical University of South Carolina-South Carolina Area Health Education Consortium (AHEC), and * Washington, D. …