Faculty Perspectives about Facilitators and Barriers to Interprofessional Education of Students

Abstract

In this paper, I introduce the importance of interprofessional education and the need to establish effective interprofessional curricula at institutions educating healthcare professional students. This is followed by the evidence that while national and international organizations recommend interprofessional education, change at the local level can be difficult. For this reason, using Kern’s framework for curriculum development (1), we undertook a needs assessment to understand better our own local context as a preliminary step for curriculum design and implementation. Using qualitative methods, we identified predisposing, enabling and reinforcing factors important to recognize and to address in order to achieve our goal of institutionalizing an effective interprofessional curriculum. In the discussion, I suggest that these factors might most effectively be addressed using a framework for change, such as the eight steps proposed by Kotter.