Definition and value

Teaching students from multiple disciplines together is not new!

t-y-p-i-c-a-l This remains me e-portfolios and portfolios as the concept is not new!

Definitions have not been consistent! t-y-p-i-c-a-l

As in e-learning, definitions even the names are not consistens!

Pellegrino's Definition includes:
1)students from more than one health profession taught by faculty from one health profession
2)students in one health profession taught by faculty from more than one profession &
3)students from more than one health profession taught by faculty from more than one profession

Hammick's Definition (1998) used interchangeably, interprofessional, multiprofessional, shared, and collaborative as describing the nature of a group of professional and also the way the practitioners interact in learning and work situations.

For the authors of this article, "Multidisciplinary will be the term used to represent teams of students and faculty from multiple health professions disciplines working and/or learning together".

Little is known about the value of a multidisciplinary component to health professions education or about whether this component is maintained when external funding is gone!!!!

What is the value of this towards health professions? what is the contribution of this interprofessional education-learning

This is clearly an issue of what could happen to initiatives such as CIPEL with regards to funding

Lessons learned from implementing multidisciplinary health professions educations models in community settings

Harris, D.L; Henry, R.C; Bland, C.J; Starnaman, S.M; Voytek, K.L

Journal of interprofessional care Vol 17, N 1, 2003

page 8