Abstract:

The Ebola virus disease (EVD) caused by Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) primarily affected three countries in West Africa during 2013-2016: Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The index case was infected in Guinea in December 2013, and subsequently spread to neighbouring countries. According to Ebola Situation Reports from the World Health Organisation, a total of 28,616 Ebola cases were reported in West Africa during the pandemic, with 11,310 deaths. This serious pandemic has highlighted gaps and lack of resources and capabilities in health care systems not only in developing countries but also in Western countries that were impacted when responding to the Ebola outbreak. Thus, serious cross-border biological incidents and outbreaks of infection can dramatically threaten human health. However, they can be can be addressed by providing an effective and rapid response from different experts, health professionals and authorities when there are appropriate tools, capabilities and understanding of these biological hazards. Thus, a series of initiatives were put in place at De Montfort University (DMU, UK) in 2016 to provide appropriate knowledge on infectious diseases to BSc Biomedical Science (BMS) students following the subject-specific threshold standards described by the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA, 2015). Curriculum changes were undertaken mostly in two modules: Basic Microbiology (level 4), after expanding this to 30 credits in the academic course 2016/17; and Medical Microbiology (level 6; 15 credits). Between the comprehensive curriculum changes performed, one of the changes that raised notable interest in BMS students was the introduction of a lecture/seminar in EBOV following our experience as first responders during the Ebola outbreak working as biomedical scientists in different Ebola laboratories built by Public Health England (PHE) in Sierra Leone. The novel methods for teaching EBOV and haemorrhagic infectious diseases have been previously described by our group (Peña-Fernández et al., 2017a); briefly we created two sessions with different degrees of difficulties to be delivered to BMS students studying level 4 or 6, respectively. Students enrolled in Medical Microbiology (level 6) also completed a workshop to respond to outbreaks of infection and protect the public following the steps of evidence-based public health methodology and the lessons learnt when responding to the EBOV outbreak in West Africa in 2015. In this paper we provide a short description of the methods used and recent student feedback collected during the delivery of this workshop in October 2017. The paper will also discuss future improvements that we are undertaking to increase the knowledge of BMS and other health science students including the creation of an e-learning unit to facilitate the study and teaching of EBOV. This novel teaching and learning resource will be publicly available from the DMU website during the first months of 2018; and it is being created following the experience of the development of the first unit for the novel DMU e-Parasitology package (Peña-Fernández et al., 2017). To conclude, the curriculum modifications performed in the BMS programme seemed to facilitate the acquisition of key competences and skills to protect human health in the aftermath of an outbreak of infection.

Keywords:

Ebola virus outbreak, infectious diseases training, field experience, evidence-based public health, curriculum modifications.