Content area
Full Text
Abstract
The large number of health care professions with overlapping scopes of practice is intimidating to students, confusing to patients, and frustrating to policymakers. As abundant and diverse as the hundreds of health care professions are, they possess sufficient numbers of common characteristics to warrant their placement on a common continuum of health professions that permits methodical comparisons. From 2009-2012, the author developed and delivered experimental courses at 2 community colleges for the purposes of creating and validating a novel method for comparing health care professions. This paper describes the bidirectional health professions continuum that emerged from these courses and its potential value in helping students select a health care career, motivating health care providers to seek interprofessional collaboration, assisting patients with the selection of health care providers, and helping policymakers to better understand the health care professions they regulate.
More than 250 health care professions exist. Each possesses distinctive scopes of practice that often overlap with those of other similar professions. This results in a combination of abundance and ambiguity that is intimidating to students attempting to select a career, confusing to patients attempting to select a provider, and frustrating to policymakers attempting to regulate the professions. The current article describes a method for objectively placing health care professions on a 2-dimensional health care continuum that can help students, consumers, and policymakers methodically compare and contrast health care professions.
Evolution of Professions
Professions, including those responsible for the delivery of health care services, evolve through a series of sequential events.1 Those events constitute the professionalization process, and 12 of them are listed in their approximate order of occurrence in Table 1. Emerging professions are those that are experiencing the early events in that process. More mature professions are those that are experiencing the latter events in the process and that may have been responsible for spawning additional and related professions.
Inventory of Professions
Using the events of the professionalization process as criteria, it is possible to identify, inventory, and classify health care professions. Perhaps the most comprehensive inventory of health care professions is contained in the Healthcare Provider Taxonomy prepared by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Developed for the purpose of reimbursing health care providers, the taxonomy assigns a...