This project intends to educate students, clinicians, and health care providers to enable them to provide optimal care for patients infected with mycobacterium tuberculosis within an academic health system environment. The long-term goals are the reorganization of aspects of the medical school curriculum that focus on tuberculosis, the development of a program of post-graduate medical education in tuberculosis, and the expansion of the medical center tuberculosis infection control curriculum to educate clinical personnel in affiliated hospitals and communities in the western Philadelphia area. To achieve these long-term goals, the applicant proposes a number of specific aims that are designed to improve tuberculosis education in the medical school curriculum in both the pre-clinical and clinical years, develop a post-graduate curriculum focusing on houseofficers in subspecialty trainees in the context of a mycobacterium diseases program clinic, disseminate infection control education regionally throughout the health system, and promote specific outreach programs for training volunteers from the Penn Medical Student Committee, and distribute infection control and other curricula to institutions affiliated with the Hospital Association of Pennsylvania. An additional specific aim is the development of audiovisual materials and computer software to support the project.
