Modifying a patient's nutrition is cost/effective for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) but underutilized by physicians due to their lack of skills in counseling patients to change adverse lifestyles. For the Nutrition Academic Award (NAA) at UAB, our first aim is to develop, implement and evaluate a multidisciplinary curriculum in nutrition and prevention of CVD. This curriculum and will focus on the training and application of skills for diet and activity counseling by a sequence of learning activities: 1) emphasis on the importance of nutrition for personal and patient health promotion and disease prevention. 2) demonstration of enjoyable, heart healthy meals prior to starting classes 3) meaningful experience with practical recipe modification and addressing patient-derived, CVD nutrition questions in the freshman nutrition course, 4) skills training in diet and activity counseling in the sophomore year, 5) application of these counseling skills in family medicine (FM) offices in their junior year and 6) advanced skills training in applied CVD prevention in a senior elective. The primary outcome of the program, improved nutrition counseling skills, will be evaluated by an objective structured clinical exam (OSCE) in their senior year. Secondary outcomes will be change in knowledge and attitudes about nutrition and CVD prevention. The dietetic intern curriculum will include partnering with freshman by consulting on recipe modification; acting as patients to instruct sophomores on counseling skills; providing nutrition information to juniors in FM practices; and writing synopses on current topics in nutrition and CVD prevention for a web-based Nutrition Network News. Attitudes about RD-MD partnership and performance on OSCE's to assess counseling competency will be evaluated at the end of their internship. Our second NAA aim will be to participate with other awardees in the development of modules for nutrition and methods for their dissemination. Our NAA team will share their expertise in content especially counseling for diet and activity change in diverse groups across the lifespan and in strategies for establishment of nutrition curricula in medical schools.
