Introduction and objective: In order to manage increasingly complex health issues, modern health systems should overcome fragmentation and provide integrated and comprehensive healthcare. The World Health Organization suggests interprofessional education as a key strategy to train healthcare professionals suitable to form collaborative practice teams which, in turn, can provide better health services to patients and communities. Despite available evidence supporting interprofessional education, the Italian academic system is still strongly characterized by a monodisciplinary learning. An experimental interdisciplinary elective course was set up within the University of Bologna. Aim of our study was to analyse facilitating and impeding elements for interdisciplinary education, starting from our local experience.
Methods: The Centre for International Health organized in 2016/2017 a Global Health elective course at the University of Bologna. The course was designed to create a facilitating setting for interdisciplinary learning, encouraging participation of students from all possible faculties. Mixed qualitative methodologies were used to assess students’ perceptions about the course. Data obtained through participant observation, satisfaction survey and focus group were analysed and then triangulated with international scientific literature.
Results: 37 students from different faculties were involved, creating a quite heterogeneous group, in relation to age, origin and course year. Thematic analysis showed several impeding elements to interdisciplinary education: a traditional curriculum centred on mono-disciplinarity, a hidden curriculum characterized by professor-student hierarchical relation and individualist behaviour characterizing the main part of the students. Shortage of professors able to teach in a multidisciplinary setting and lack of dedicated spaces and time for interprofessional education were also identified as structural negative factors. Facilitating elements for the engagement and active participation of the students were: the use of informal interactive teaching methodologies, problem-based learning and group-work as horizontal learning tools. These activities, contextualized in a multidisciplinary setting, allowed collective empowerment along with knowledge and competence transfer among students.
Conclusions: In an experimental context, such as the Global Health elective course, the facilitating elements can easily be adopted to implement effective interdisciplinary learning. On the contrary impeding elements cannot be completely overcome unless a long-term systemic approach is adopted.