Interdisciplinarity in health education: updating, successes and challenges

Abstract

The advent of the concept of interdisciplinarity arose from the need to update traditional curricula in view of the complexity of health problems and the search for training professionals with a more global vision and a reflective attitude, less fragmented and biological, resulting in the correlation between the disciplines as an important tool in current healthcare education. The aim of the study is to present an update on the importance of interdisciplinarity in the curricular formation of health education and its applicability in the context of health work. A literature review was carried out in the Scielo, Lilacs and PUBMED/Medline databases, between January 2016 and April 2021 with the keywords interdisciplinarity, education and health. 77 publications related to the keywords were identified. Of these, 23 were considered relevant to the scope of the study. The publications show successful examples of the implementation of interdisciplinarity as a curricular model tool in healthcare courses and between different courses in this area (interprofessionality), cases of educational institutions that have already used it for a long time in their curricula and discuss the challenges to its implementation and its benefits to the professional egress and to the society that receives their service. It is necessary to implement interdisciplinarity in the curricula of health schools so that we can train professionals who have a more global and reflective vision for patients and society.