Abstract:

Biological incidents involve natural, accidental or deliberate release of biological agents which can lead to outbreaks and also contamination of the environment with significant impact on human health. Outbreaks and intentional attacks (bioterrorism) represent a significant challenge to healthcare professionals due to the significant numbers of patients affected. Biomedical and medical scientists can play a key role in collaborative response efforts to protect public health and reduce the spread of the biological hazard. This was demonstrated during the recent international response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015 in Sierra Leone, West Africa. However, appropriate training to respond to biological incidents is lacking in biomedical and medical science programmes taught in the UK. Therefore, a series of initiatives have been put in place at De Montfort University (DMU, UK) to address this need in the two human health science degrees. We have developed different novel teaching sessions to teach students in the UK following our experience as biomedical scientists at the Public Health England (PHE) mobile laboratories built in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak. The novel teaching sessions have been described in Peña-Fernández and Choi (2016). These sessions aim to facilitate the acquisition of key competences and skills to protect human health in the aftermath of a biological incident. We initially tested them with DMU medical science students in 2015/16 in which students developed intervention programmes during hypothetical scenarios of Ebola and Zika outbreaks in the UK, using evidence based medicine protocols. Following a high level of student satisfaction, we have performed the following improvements that will be tested in 2016/17: introduction of a practical element that includes the development of a mock-mobile isolator, so students can learn how to work with this critical equipment to manage highly contagious clinical samples necessary to make a diagnosis. Moreover, a new workshop has been developed in which final year students from both degrees will develop an intervention programme to deal with the emerging disease Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever that has threatened different EU countries such as Spain this summer. Peer teaching will be used to enhance students’ revision of these topics and overcome current limitations of time in the delivery of these teaching sessions. Learning through peer-to-peer interaction has shown to improve student engagement and improve active learning. Students will also be provided with a workbook to help them with the development of this activity. A validated questionnaire has been developed to analyse whether these teaching sessions are successful in providing undergraduate students with the skills necessary to face future biological incidents. This article will describe the novel teaching sessions developed so far that might be adopted in other related human health degrees to teach key competences necessaries in the aftermath of a biological incident to protect human health.

Keywords:

Haemorrhagic virus, biological incidents training, field experience, evidence-based medicine.