2009 Rho Chi Lecture: Interdisciplinary Health Professions Education: A Systems Approach to Bridging The Gaps

Abstract

None of us is as smart as all of us. -Japanese proverb It is an absolute privilege and honor to stand before you as the 2009 Rho Chi Award recipient. Paying homage to those intellectual leaders and the community of scholars who have come before me, I am truly humbled to have been asked to give this lecture. In keeping with the spirit and fundamental objective of the Rho Chi Society, which is to “promote the advancement of the pharmaceutical sciences through the encouragement and recognition of sound scholarship,” I would like to share my thoughts with you on the criticality of interdisciplinary health professions education and would like to suggest a systems approach to bridging the gaps that exist today. In setting the stage for this lecture, allow me to start by sharing with you the story of the crash of United Airlines flight 232 in 1989. The crash of a DC-10 in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989 was a major, uncommon tragedy in American aviation. Many lives were lost. But this great tragedy also served as an important lesson and opened new thinking in the training of cockpit crews. On July 19, 1989, when United Airlines flight 232 took off from Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado, and headed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, via Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, no one could have imagined what lay ahead. About an hour and 7 minutes into the flight, at an altitude of 37,000 feet, the fan disk on the Douglas DC-10 aircraft tail engine broke in two and suffered an uncontained failure.1 All controls on the aircraft failed except for the power levers in the remaining 2 engines. Using all possible means and resources, Captain Alfred Haynes, First Officer William Records, Second Officer Dudley Dvorak, and DC-10 flight instructor and pilot Dennis Fitch, made an emergency landing on the runway at the Sioux City, Iowa, airport. Unfortunately, during the landing, the aircraft split in two. That day, 111 people lost their lives, including 110 passengers and 1 crew member.2