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

There is a common belief that health professional competencies exist as a series of independent silos in each profession that has resulted in many barriers for interprofessional education. In this paper we have demonstrated that it is possible to overcome some of these challenges by harmonizing the core competence into a framework that can be used as a template for interprofessional curriculum design, education of learners, guidance for faculty who teach in the programs, and evaluation. The harmonization model would suggest that interprofessional education is optimized when practitioners have the opportunity to compare their respective identities and have shared experiences that use common language. Such models, when translated into curricular change and evaluation, facilitate 360-degree evaluation in teams. This would be a significant step in assisting health care delivery to clients and their families to become seamless, efficient, and effective.

The authors thank Paula Durando for assistance in the literature search and Fairleigh Seaton and Erin Lawson for their initial work on the harmonization framework development.

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