Interdisciplinary Rural Health Training

With institutional support and external funding from the Duke Endowment as well as from the federal Bureau of Health Professions, ECU faculty and staff have established a model interdisciplinary training program in three communities for students in one of 10 health science disciplines.

Students come from not only East Carolina University, but also from seven other universities across the state. The Interdisciplinary Rural Health Training Program (IRHTP) began with a vision of leveraging the opportunities provided by the concurrent community based education of health science students from multiple disciplines. The idea of providing a "value-added" curriculum which would span all disciplines while not interfering with the discipline specific training necessary for licensing and subsequent practice was implemented. 

The core elements of the interdisciplinary design included activities to expose students in a structured way to other disciplines (cross-disciplinary experiences, team home visits), to institute collaborative patient management through carefully planned interdisciplinary case conferences, and to encourage rural practice through a series of team community experiences (community site visits). Students are also encouraged to work together on community projects which have been identified by local citizens. Throughout, the goals of the interdisciplinary curriculum -- to provide students with the knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviors necessary to practice in an interdisciplinary fashion in a rural community and to improve the health of the community-- are paramount in all of the activities undertaken by the students. 

Using a public health model as the basis for our curriculum development has enabled the needs of the community to drive the learning for students who are immersed in the community. The program is governed by an Executive Council with representation from faculty in each discipline, community-based representatives, program administration, program consultants, and an academic fellow. This Council meets quarterly to track progress of the program, plan for student rotations, discuss and implement programmatic changes, and plan for program expansion.

Preliminary results indicate that the IRHTP program has produced a marked enhancement of student learning through the service-learning and interdisciplinary components. Likewise, the interdisciplinary program has strengthening the infrastructure and commitment of the University for decentralized education, and has expanded services for the community including, changes in staff mix, changes in institutional goals, the development of team-based care paths, and changes in the attitudes of providers regarding interdisciplinary service-learning.

Other models of interdisciplinary training have been developed both on campus and in the rural communities of eastern North Carolina. ECU has made a substantial commitment to interdisciplinary health sciences education and welcomes you to come and explore with our new office how to build upon our initial successes in order to create an optimal learning environment for a variety of learners across many health science disciplines.