IOM Selects Four Innovation Collaboratives
The U.S. Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Board on Global Health has chosen 4 innovation collaboratives from 12 proposals from academic institutions around the world. The collaboratives are intended to incubate and pilot ideas for reforming health professional education called for in the Lancet Commission report and will be a key part of IOM’s new Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education, to be launched in March 2012. The development of the Forum has been spearheaded by Patrick Kelley, MD, DrPH, who is director of the Boards on Global Health and African Science Academy Development at IOM and was one of the Lancet report Commissioners.
“It was an extremely competitive process and though only four could be chosen, it is gratifying to see the global interest in innovating curricular and institutional reform,” says Dr. Kelley.
The four Innovation Collaboratives are:
• Canadian Interprofessional Health Leadership Collaborative – a partnership led by the University of Toronto that also includes Queen’s University, Université Laval, University of British Colombia, and Northern Ontario School of Medicine. Their focus is on the development of interprofessional collaborative leadership.
• Public Health Foundation of India partnership with the Symbiosis College of Nursing (Pune) and the Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences (Sawangi). Their focus is on building interdisciplinary leadership skills to help overcome the highly compartmentalized approach to professional education in India. The leadership team will identify interdisciplinary leadership competencies and pilot a training model.
• Makerere University (Uganda), a partnership involving schools of medicine, public health, and nursing. Their focus is on “defining competencies, developing and implementing an interprofessional training model to develop competencies and skills in the realm of health professions ethics and professionalism.”
• A South African collaboration involving Stellenbosch University, the University of the Western Cape, and the University of the Free State. They propose to develop competencies for transformational and shared leadership on health teams, and to focus on the design and implementation of competency-based interprofessional skills for teamwork in community and primary health care settings.
One person from each collaborative will be delegated as a member of the Forum and video links will connect Forum meetings in Washington, DC with each collaborative in their respective countries.
“In this way, the Forum will establish a two-way conversation so Forum members can learn more about the activities on the ground in these 4 countries,” says Patricia Cuff, MPH, Study Director of the IOM Global Forum.
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