The increasing frequency of incidents involving hazardous materials (HazMat) encompassing a wide range of chemical and biological environmental contaminants shows a need to teach environmental toxicology, public health and emergency preparedness to future health care professionals to protect the public. Serious HazMat incidents present an enormous challenge in the health care sector and may involve national and international health service collaboration requiring specific training. The development of educational programmes for health care professionals to manage serious HazMat incidents is needed and this should be harmonised within the EU. Moreover, the pharmaceutical and chemical industries in conjunction with the public health sector are demanding professionals with specific knowledge to respond to HazMat events and deal with environments seriously impacted by chemical or biological incidents that can threaten human health. Future professionals will need specific knowledge to implement different intervention strategies for health protection. Our teaching innovation group is developing a series of novel teaching sessions including short courses, lectures, workshops and tutorials, to train undergraduate and postgraduate health science students in these topics in two EU Universities: University of Alcalá (UAH, Spain) and De Montfort University (DMU, UK). We are using guidelines from organisations such as The Environmental Protection Agency and Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, the UK National Health Service, as well experience from the field gained from the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Additionally, a combination of different pedagogic approaches are being used, e.g. "peer teaching" (Benè and Bergus, 2014) or ProblemBased Learning (PBL) to create a variety of teaching materials and sessions. These pedagogic approaches were adapted for a diverse student cohort with limited knowledge of environmental toxicology, emergency preparedness and risk assessment. Specifically, we created a specialised short training course in environmental toxicology for pharmacists at UAH (Peña-Fernández et al., 2015), which was improved for the 2015/16 academic session using students' feedback from the previous course. This was also delivered to undergraduate (BMedSci. Medical Sciences) and postgraduate (MSc. Advanced Biomedical Science) students at DMU. The main objective of these teaching sessions was to provide the students with basic knowledge to implement an intervention programme to protect the public in the aftermath of a HazMat incident or a pandemic outbreak. All the teaching sessions and materials were highly interactive, requiring a high level of participation and preparation from the students due to their short duration. Despite their short duration we observed high levels of student engagement/satisfaction (e.g. nearly 100% from pharmacists attending the training course at UAH this year). The novel teaching sessions created at both universities could effectively provide students with pub...
Capacity building in Sierra Leone (West Africa) is critical to prevent potential future outbreaks similar to the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak that had devastating effects for the country and its poorly developed healthcare system. De Montfort University (DMU) in the United Kingdom (UK), in collaboration with parasitologists from the Spanish Universities of San Pablo CEU and Miguel Hernández de Elche, is leading a project to build the teaching and research capabilities of medical parasitology at the University of Makeni (UniMak, Sierra Leone). This project has two objectives: a) to introduce and enhance the teaching of medical parasitology, both theoretical and practical; and b) to implement and develop parasitology research related to important emerging human parasites such as Cryptosporidium spp. due to their public health significance. Two UniMak academics, hired to help initiate and implement the research part of the project, shared their culturally sensitive public health expertise to broker parasitology research in communities and perform a comprehensive environmental monitoring study for the detection of different emerging human parasites. The presence of targeted parasites are being studied microscopically using different staining techniques, which in turn have allowed UniMak's academics to learn these techniques to develop new practicals in parasitology. To train UniMak's academics and develop both parts of our project, a DMU researcher visited UniMak for two weeks in April 2019 and provided a voluntary short training course in basic parasitology, which is currently not taught in any of their programmes, and was attended by 31 students. These sessions covered basic introduction to medical parasitology and life-cycle, pathogenesis, detection, treatment and prevention of: a) coccidian parasites (Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora and Cystoisospora); b) Giardia intestinalis, Entamoeba and free-living amoebas; c) malaria and d) microsporidia. A theoretical session on common staining techniques was also provided. To facilitate the teaching and learning of these parasites, the novel resource DMU e-Parasitology was used, a package developed by the above participating universities and biomedical scientists from the UK National Health Service (NHS): http://parasitology.dmu.ac.uk/ index.htm. Following the two weeks of training, UniMak's academics performed different curriculum modifications to the undergraduate programme 'Public Health: Medical Laboratory Sciences', which includes the introduction of new practicals in parasitology and changes to enhance the content of medical parasitology that will be subjected to examination. Thus, a new voluntary practical on Kinyoun stain for the detection of coccidian parasites was introduced in the final year module of 'Medical Bacteriology and Parasitology'; eighteen students in pairs processed faecal samples from pigs provided by the Department of Agriculture and Food Security from a nearby farm. Academics at UniMak used the Kinyoun staining unit (available at http://parasitology.dmu.ac....
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