Interprofessional education in ethics at an academic health sciences center

The authors relate their experiences with interprofessional teaching of ethics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, describing the history, planning, content, and structure of a required ethics course and discussing its role in the institution's plan to create more interprofessional education opportunities. The authors describe both the benefits of teaching ethics on an interprofessional basis and the challenges they encountered in launching the course. Challenges included responding to diverse and divergent faculty and student reactions, controlling a curriculum across schools, and learning how to think about education in interprofessional rather than profession-specific ways. Included in the discussion are the results obtained with various evaluation tools designed and assessed by the Office of Education on the campus, to which students and faculty responded the first time the course was offered.