Abstract:

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 Problem-Based 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 public health knowledge and tools to develop a response and preparedness intervention against chemical or biological events. This communication will describe the different teaching activities and students’ feedback/opinions collected at both participating universities for 2015/16. We consider that this training programme could be used to develop appropriate training to health care professionals in the EU.

Keywords:

Undergraduate and postgraduate training, public health, environmental toxicology, HazMat management.