Common curricula in Norway: Differential implementation and differential outcomes in undergraduate health and social care education

In 1972 Norwegian health and educational authorities emphasized the importance of interprofessional collaboration in health care and the need to prepare students to work across boundaries. In 1995 the Norwegian government recommended a common core in curricula for undergraduate health and social educational programmes in all university colleges throughout the country in the belief that this would improve collaborative practice and deliver more effective and efficient health care. It provided no additional resources and left the colleges to exercise their discretion regarding the form that implementation should take. All adopted the common core. Some introduced it as uniprofessional learning, others jointly for all or some of their relevant programmes. Findings to be presented in this paper will compare perceptions of interprofessionalism between four cohorts of health care students at Oslo University College before and after the introduction of the common core in 2003. A questionnaire designed to elicit perceptions of “interprofessionalism” was administered to these four groups. Responses were analysed using SPSS by means of cross-tabulations and one-way analysis. The results show, first, that students with a common core in the curricula valued interprofessionalism more highly than did those without and, second, that students with the common core taught together valued interprofessionalism more highly than those where it was taught separately.