Identifying Unique Integrated Care Competencies to Inform Health Profession Curriculum Development

Integrated care can enhance health outcomes for patients, as well as improve healthcare efficiency for organisations. However, it is unclear what values and competencies health professionals need to develop at the pre-qualification stage to engage in integrated care practice upon graduation. Therefore, this review aimed to identify published integrated care competencies for professional entry health professional education programmes.

Guided by the systematic search methods of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses, PubMed and CINAHL were searched for publications between January 2013 and December 2022. A two-stage screening process was used to determine eligibility of papers against the set inclusion criteria.

The initial search yielded 493 articles, with 35 articles eligible for full text screening. Of these, five articles addressed integrated care curriculum in a general sense and were included in the review. The focus of these articles was mainly educational activities and professional attributes deemed important for students to experience and develop if they are to work across sectors and systems. However, no studies described a specific set of integrated care competencies for students enrolled in any health discipline at professional entry level.

Since our review, several frameworks covering a broad range of professional competency domains for integrated care have been recently published. A distillation of these frameworks is now needed to identify the unique capabilities required for new health professionals to deliver integrated care.

Educators now need specific integrated care competencies so they can create appropriate, learning, teaching and assessment experiences for pre-entry students.