Trend 3: interprofessional health care
education meets globalization
Health care leadership poses many challenges, beginning with how we educate health care professionals. The typical, silo-effect educational approach has made it especially difficult to provide interprofessional education, although health care is primarily delivered by teams of health care professionals.7 Collaborations hold promise for breaking down silos and promoting transformative learning.18 Learning with others increases learners’ capacity to critically reason and to practically address local priorities. The Lancet report on “Health professionals for a new century”7 detailed some key academic reforms related to globalization: (a) adoption of a flexible, 21st century competency-based curricula; (b) interprofessional education to promote collaborative, non-hierarchical teamwork; (c) information technology implementation for distance education and networking; (d) local adaptation; (e) effective resource utilization, including faculty development; and (f) a new professionalism or culture based on globalization (ie, knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and values founded on global health interdependencies). The report acknowledged that traditional academic institutions will have to undergo structural and process reforms to philosophically reform themselves. The Lancet report recommended, for instance, joint planning mechanisms in every country to engage key stakeholder groups, such as the government, professional associations, academic and practice communities, and the public. The report, therefore, underscored the importance of collective health care leadership and its place within interprofessional health care education.
Our proposition: global health care leaders need to be collective leaders: the learning process begins with interprofessional education.