Over the past decade the University of Maryland at
Baltimore (UMB) and the University of Maryland
School of Nursing (UMSON) have been engaged in a
multi-stage process of exploring new ideas for global
health education which has led to implementing organizational
processes and structures to support a series
of innovative educational programs.1 Creating global
health educational opportunities for our students at
UMB was a collective effort, initiated and led by an
interprofessional group of faculty.2 In 2004, when this
process began with the formation of the global health
concentration of UMB’s new MPH program, there
was no formal global health educational program at
UMB. While UMB’s School of Medicine had impressive
strengths in global health research and service
delivery at that time, not a single general introductory
course on global health was available to students from
the UMB Schools of Nursing, Medicine, Dentistry,
Pharmacy, Law, and Social Work. In this paper we will try to reconstruct the process of organizational learning
that led to the development of our global health
educational capacity by utilizing an implementation
research framework3 in addition to several key concepts
drawn from the organizational and managerial
sciences literature.4 Our emphasis will not be on interprofessional
global health student competencies per
se, but rather on the organizational capabilities we
had to develop as an institution to be able to foster
competencies in our students.