|
Each year almost 15,000 new cases of active TB are diagnosed in the United States, and about one-third of the world’s population is infected with the bacterium — Mycobacterium tuberculosis — that causes TB.
“It has become apparent that we need to raise awareness of TB among our students and faculty,” said Sandra Latshaw, assistant professor and curriculum coordinator for the School of Allied Health Professions Clinical Laboratory Science Program.
Latshaw is one of several health education professionals from 24 schools around the United States working with the National Tuberculosis Curriculum Consortium (NTCC) to design, implement and evaluate tuberculosis curricula.
Led by the University of California San Diego, School of Medicine, the NTCC was established in 2003 under a five-year contract from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
The mission of the NTCC is to instill knowledge, skills and appropriate attitudes in the management and control of active and latent tuberculosis among undergraduate and graduate students in their formative years as well as establish a foundation by which complex issues relating to TB can be continually revisited throughout the span of their careers.
The disciplines targeted include medicine, nursing (both baccalaureate and advanced practice), public health, pharmacy, respiratory therapy and physician assistant, as well as clinical laboratory science.
Since its formation the NTCC has developed a number of active learning materials based on the latest educational theories and principles. These materials are available, free of charge, on the NTCC Web site at http://ntcc.ucsd.edu.
UNMC is one of the schools contributing to the curriculum, Latshaw said.
Dr. Susanna VonEssen and Darwin Brown with the UNMC Physician’s Assistant Program are also NTCC grant participants.
“Not all of the disciplines at UNMC are aware that these materials are available to them,” Latshaw said.
She would like to see more faculty and students take advantage of the free educational products NTCC has to offer. Six months from now, Latshaw will be surveying UNMC faculty in each of the NTCC disciplines to see if they or their students are accessing the Web site and find it useful.
The interactive Web site offers core competencies for TB in each of the eight disciplines mentioned above, vetted computerized cases, exam questions, multimedia images/videos and Power Point presentations. Standardized patient simulations will be added in the near future.
“The Web site is a work in progress,” Latshaw said. “If you don’t see something now, check back often because it very may well be available later.”