Educating about Prevention

One goal of the Surgeon General’s Healthy People 2010 report called for increasing “the proportion of schools of medicine, schools of nursing and health professional training schools whose basic curriculum for health care providers includes the core competencies in health promotion and disease prevention.”

Prompted by this goal, a task force of the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine, with representatives from many clinical health professional educational associations, worked for two years to identify curricular themes that would help meet the Surgeon General’s goal. Their efforts produced a Clinical Prevention and Population Health Curriculum Framework for organizing and monitoring curriculum and for communicating among the represented disciplines.

Building on that work, and with this grant, the task force is expanding its support of inter-professional collaboration by:

• Promoting broad distribution of the Clinical Prevention and Population Health Curriculum Framework across the health care professions through discipline-specific articles, press releases and presentations at national meetings;
• Developing an online Prevention Education Resource Center for faculty;
• Using the resource center to enhance program and curriculum content and to provide listserves for faculty exchange;
• Developing and convening a state-of-the-science national interprofessional conference on clinical prevention, population health, and inter-professional education, practice and research.

The task force also will adapt the resource center to help add public health education into undergraduate curricula, as recommended in the 2003 Institute of Medicine Report Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? Educating Public Health Professionals for the Twenty-first Century. Pilot efforts to develop the Resource Center during the first year will utilize available online resources including CDC case studies, the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and vaccination curriculum materials developed by the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine. Evaluation is part of the pilot phase and will continue throughout implementation.