First Funding Cycle
09/01/93 - 08/31/98

Abstract

The Tuberculosis Academic Award will give Lee B. Reichman, M.D., M.P.H.and the New Jersey Medical School Tuberculosis Center the recognition and resources to concentrate their efforts in making tuberculosis an integral part of the school's curriculum through its educational programs for undergraduate and graduate students, and for faculty and physicians in practice. This will be accomplished in cooperation with departments, introducing and maintaining tuberculosis in all areas of the medical school curriculum, providing tutorials, and use of standardized patients with tuberculosis specific scenarios. Continuing education programs will be developed at every level utilizing these modalities. All these activities will be carried out in relationship to the N J Statewide Plan to Control Multidrug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB) in New Jersey published in 1992. Each aspect of the tuberculosis innovation will be specifically evaluated and a program evaluation scheme over the entire life of the grant is proposed.

This program will be carried out in the newly created New Jersey Medical School Tuberculosis Center of which Dr. Reichman has been appointed full time Director. The Center's mission is to be a state of the art training/education, patient care, and research center for New Jersey and the region. The Tuberculosis Academic Award support will allow us to target our own students, house-officers, faculty and other health care workers in this effort, and to use the experience as a model in regional and ultimately national training efforts.

A specific curriculum in TB will be developed across all four years of the undergraduate experience utilizing the existing National Tuberculosis Training Initiative Core Curriculum and it will be modified for postgraduate students and for other health care workers. A series of scenarios for standardized patient exercises in diagnosis, management and control of TB to include Hispanic subjects will be developed, evaluated and published, and an ongoing continuing education course will be created, evaluated and promoted.

Accomplishments of the Past Year

• Tuberculosis lectures and workshops are now found in all four years of medical school training at our institution including the departments of Immunology, Medicine, Microbiology, Preventive Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology.

• Use of standardized patients in the Introduction to Clinical Sciences course. Students are videotaped interacting with standardized patients in three different scenarios. In addition to immediate feedback from the standardized patients, medical students view the videotape with education staff who provide the students with self-assessment tools and additional feedback.