Confronting The Paradigm Of Discipline Specific Expert Knowledge: Is Professional Integration The Holy Grail For Sustainable And Authentic Models Of Co-Production And Integrated Care?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) global strategy on-people centred and integrated health services calls for a radical shift in the way health services are funded, managed and delivered. The juxtaposition of longevity, burden of chronic disease and availability of complex medical interventions is stretching the health system’s ability to deliver, and government’s capacity to financially sustain. Online availability of healthcare information has created a ‘participative consumer’ challenging the historical, paternalistic and imbalanced clinician-patient relationship. Transition from ‘informed patient-care’ to ‘patient informed care’ is driving a new model of co-produced health, where care is delivered in an equal and reciprocal relationship between the consumer and provider of care. Governments and health providers globally have recognised that sustainability of quality and cost-effective care requires them to move beyond rhetoric and adapt to a person-centred and integrated health care model that recognises the consumer and their family as lived-experts in the co-production of their health care. So, with this level of commitment, why is integration so difficult? Is inter-professional education and training the missing link? Is professional integration the Holy Grail for sustainable and authentic models of co-production and integrated care? Does the current traditional approach to undergraduate health professional training act as a barrier to consumer-centred care? Does the structure of intra-discipline specific knowledge create a professional “inwardness” and impervious professional boundary that does not adequately prepare the new graduate to embrace and work within co-produced and integrated models of care? This paper will present a new associate degree in aged and integrated care that has been designed to create an ‘unbounded-discipline-specific professional’ prepared specifically to work within a co-produced model of integrated service delivery. The curriculum will focus on imparting a comprehensive knowledge of the principles underpinning integrated health care within the context of ageing from primary through to tertiary care; an advanced understanding of the values, theory and application of person-centred care; and capacity to lead, manage and work within a model of co-designed service delivery