Building an interprofessional curriculum framework for health: a paradigm for health function

There is an increasing call for curricula in health care to facilitate interprofessional client-centred evidence-based decision making through a reflective and reflexive framework. This discussion paper proposes that adoption of the World Health Organisation, International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) as a framework for curricula of health professionals promotes the necessary paradigm shift needed to legitimise a broad evidence base as the foundation of interprofessional dialogue. Client function is seen as the product of an open system incorporating the individual, social and environmental influences on behaviour, with the role of the professional being to acknowledge the context of individual behaviour through an understanding of individual's functioning in their environment. It is concluded that client focused practice and an iterative process of clinical reasoning based on a broad evidence base that conceptualises health care as the maintenance and promotion of health across the lifespan requires a re-conceptualising of health. The emerging concept shifts the primary emphasis of health care away from post-diagnosis tertiary care towards clients who maintain a life-long independence in the community.