Interdisciplinarity: the story of a journey.

Everywhere we turn, interdisciplinarity has become a key concept guiding health care education and practice. Granting agencies call for it. Educational and health policy makers extol its virtues. Accreditation agencies across health disciplines recommend it as a competency for the present and future. But what is it? How do we get it from our educational and practice systems that are compartmentalized by claims to discipline-specific knowledge, tradition, and the flow of dollars from funding sources? What is it like after we do get it? And most of all, why would we ever want it in the first place? ([paragraph]) We have had some significant experience within our Division of Health Sciences in interdisciplinary teaching, practice, and scholarship. Our experience was initially framed by implementation of one of the seven W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Partnerships for Health Professions Education grants. The grant brought the education of medical, nursing, and other health professions students out of the hospital to interdisciplinary primary care experiences in and with the community. We will never tell you we have a straightforward prescription for success. Living interdisciplinarity, like living life itself, is something that frequently poses more questions than it answers. We will, with enthusiasm, share with you what we have learned in our unique journey together in hopes that you and your colleagues will find something useful for your own voyage into interdisciplinarity. Our university is a strong regional institution, with a little over 11,000 students. We are located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, in the far northeast corner of Tennessee where we experience a comfortable blend of desirable metropolitan amenities in our small cities with the striking and immediate ruralness of the surrounding Appalachian countryside. The year 1988 was critical in the life of our university. For the first time, our longstanding Colleges of Nursing and Public and Allied Health joined with our relatively young College of Medicine to form a Division of Health Sciences. The division was directed by a vice president for health affairs who was also dean of medicine. Each of the three college executives were new in their positions, and each was serving as dean of a college for the first time. The first year was spent in organizing and making operational a new and formal way of doing business in the university system, and in dialogue among the deans. Real changes in the educational programs, faculty practice activities, or even faculty interactions were, however, far down the road. Challenged to help rebuild the local health care system, disciplines learned the rudiments of collaboration The next year, 1989, brought a unique opportunity. A group of citizens and government officials in the region challenged the College of Medicine and the College of Nursing to assist them in rebuilding a deteriorating health care system in their isolated, rural county. The deans of each unit, clearly recognizing the need for access to health care in our regional service area, agreed to help. Another tier of medical (Department of Family Medicine) and nursing faculty and administrators tentatively joined in the "getting acquainted" process. Like toddlers in parallel play, however, each unit developed a separate clinic for their own discipline to begin to meet rural community needs. The basic collaborations that developed between the units were rudimentary, but were the foundation of deeper commitments to come. The call for proposals by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Partnerships for Health Professions Education arrived early in 1990. The deans of the colleges were excited by the concepts outlined in the proposal request, and believed they were highly consistent with the values of our young division: primary care, service to the community, and--sure, why not--deepening our relationships as an interdisciplinary team. …