Developing a national undergraduate standardized curriculum for future healthcare professionals on “Making Every Contact Count” for chronic disease prevention in the Republic of Ireland

Abstract

This report describes the development of the first national undergraduate interprofessional standardised curriculum in chronic disease prevention for healthcare professionals in the Republic of Ireland. This project brought together for the first time all higher education institutions nationwide in a novel collaboration with the national health service i.e. the Health Service Executive (HSE), to develop a standardised national curriculum for undergraduate health care professions. The curriculum sits within the framework of Making Every Contact Count (Health Service Executive, 2016), the goal of which is to re-orientate health services to embed the ethos of prevention through lifestyle behaviour change as part of the routine care of health professionals. The core focus of Making Every Contact Count is chronic disease prevention, targeting four main lifestyle risk factors for chronic disease; tobacco use, alcohol consumption, physical inactivity and unhealthy eating.Making Every Contact Count is a key component of Healthy Ireland, the Irish national framework for health and wellbeing (Department of Health, 2013). The aim of the curriculum is to prepare newly qualified health professionals with the skills needed to support patients to achieve lifestyle behaviour change delivered as part of routine clinical care.

Development of real world learning opportunities in community exercise prescription for healthcare professional programmes - ‘Physio Hub’

“…A shorter clinical affiliation using the Physio Hub model to achieve specifically defined learning outcomes may therefore be sufficient. The main 4D framework [17], other exercise and PA focused frameworks (see Dimension1) and guideline documents identified in this paper [6,20,36,40] support transferability to other programmes and HEIs, with further recent publications supporting the drive to embed PA and exercise content in medical curricula [55][56][57].…”

“…Despite progress in appointing more Primary care teams in Ireland, significant shortfalls persist in terms of students gaining the relevant clinical experience and acute hospital approaches continue to dominate within health systems [22,25,34,35]. Recent national chronic disease curriculum project work [36,37] revealed a lack of experiential learning opportunities, for the recommended physical activity promotion interventions, within healthcare professional curricula.…”

Engaging students in experiential learning through a public health campaign: a pre–post survey on hypertension and diabetes mellitus

“…Self-assessment in this study, on the other hand, was structured and connected to the needs of the university's extra-curriculum credit units, in contrast to Kolb's reflective observation abilities, which did not emphasise “critical” reflection (Morris, 2020). Students did, however, gain additional skills necessary for their professional careers, which will help them continue to learn and practise in a field with ever-expanding positions in public health (Sinclair et al , 2020; Singh et al , 2020; Smith and Olin, 2010).…”

Animal obesity: What insights can a one health approach offer when it comes to veterinarians ‘making every contact count’?

“…MECC is recommended regardless of the patient's purpose of contact or the practitioner's speciality 32 . In recent years, the effectiveness of MECC in human healthcare has been explored across a number of domains, including chronic conditions in adults and children, radiography, dentistry, vaccine uptake and smoking cessation during the COVID pandemic 34–39 …”