Developing an Interprofessional Global Health Course
UMB faculty members created the campus’s first interprofessional
global health course — “Critical Issues in
Global Health” — in 2005, open to students from all
UMB professional schools. The course is now taught
in the School of Nursing by the director of the OGH
together with faculty members from most of UMB’s
professional schools. In the class students are placed
into interprofessional teams that take on a number of
assignments that focus on global health issues within
a specific WHO geographical region. One of the purposes
of the group work is to get students from different
professions to solve problems with students
from other professions who have markedly different
perspectives and competencies than their own. Interprofessional
teams of students are asked to tackle
problems that require a “big picture” perspective that
no one profession or discipline alone has the answers
to, such as: “What is the impact of economic globalization
on the population health of the region of the
world to which you have been assigned?” The student
teams are asked to apply the social determinants of
health framework developed by the WHO Commission
on the Social Determinants of Health to address
the complex causal pathways that lead from social,
political, and economic structures through intermediary
determinants to specific health outcomes.33 Most
students find this assignment to be the most challenging
yet most rewarding learning experience in
the course. Over the past few years the WHO social
determinants framework has provided an architecture
for the course as a whole, which was previously fragmented
into important but disconnected topical areas
and lacking an overarching conceptual framework.
Our experience teaching this course suggests that the
capacity to understand and apply the social determinants
of health framework in a global context is an
essential interprofessional global health competency
that is not currently being taught consistently within
any of the health professions except public health. It
provides the interprofessional global health student
with an essential set of conceptual tools that are necessary
to understand both the causes and potential
solutions to global health challenges.