Core Competencies for Health Care Professionals: What Medicine, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, and Physiotherapy Share

Journal of Allied Health, Summer 2006 by Verma, Sarita, Paterson, Margo, Medves, Jennifer

A competency model that defines a set of expected skills both "vertically" and "horizontally" between health care professions does not exist. A major barrier to the success of interprofessional education has been the lack of understanding of shared competencies for the members of the health care education team and a lack of common vocabulary that can be used interchangeably for teaching and evaluation.2

Consensus on core competencies in health care provides a common framework and language for discussing how to teach and evaluate the expectations for interdisciplinary performance in health care teams. Common core competencies provide a shared understanding of the scope and requirements of a specific role and mutual organizationwide standards for performance.

Literature Review

A systematic review of the literature was conducted of MEDLINE, CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine), and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. The search terms included: education, competency-based; education, interdisciplinary; interprofessional relations; professional competence; delivery of health care, integrated; clinical competence; and patient care team. The yield from this intensive search was extremely limited.

Although there were various articles about the importance of shared learning,3 interprofessional education,4-6 working together as teams,7-9 and integrated health delivery systems,10 there were few articles that outlined specific competencies across disciplines. One paper11 outlined the need for allied health professionals to shift educational paradigms to articulate common competencies across several disciplines and recommended a proposal for achieving and measuring competencies in an interdisciplinary manner.

Barr12 suggested that the case for competency-based interprofessional education rests on the need to:

* Reposition interprofessional education in the mainstream of contemporary professional education;

* Enable students to relate professional and interprofessional studies coherently;

* Enable students on interprofessional courses to claim credits as part of their professional education;

* Gain the approval of validating bodies;

* Attract support from employers;

* Compensate for deficits in existing models of interprofessional education;

* Equip professionals for multidimensional collaboration.

A Cochrane review in 2000(13) assessed the usefulness of interprofessional educational interventions and indicated that there is a need for rigorous studies of interprofessional education as a way forward to encourage more collaborative learning. This is beginning to happen with focus groups on the feasibility of interprofessional education and the perceptions of its effects14 and initiatives such as the Health Canada funding for research on Interprofessional Education for Collaborative Patient-Centered Practice (IECPCP).15

With these gaps, the authors decided to develop a model describing the shared competencies across four professions: namely, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy. To achieve this goal, the development of the competencies in each of the four disciplines, starting with the CanMEDS's roles, were reviewed, and recommendations for harmonization of the core competencies were developed. This model is summarized in Table 1.