The curriculum in some academic fields changes more rapidly than others, and one of the most changeable fields is in health care, particularly as it relates to bioterrorism. There is currently no standardized curriculum model for educating community college health care professional students regarding the appropriate response related to bioterrorism, chemical and nuclear incidents.
Illinois community colleges produce more practicing health professionals than all the other four-year academic institutions in Illinois together. Community colleges are the primary provider of the health profession workforce preparation in the state, so it is important that the curriculum they offer includes bioterrorism emergency response content.
With that as a focus, a $300,000 grant has been received by Illinois State University's Frank Waterstraat, Health Sciences, and Eileen Fowles, Mennonite College of Nursing, to develop bioterrorism curricula for applied health programs in Illinois community colleges. The grant is from the Bureau of Health Professions in the Health Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Although instructional materials on the topic are available on the Internet, the material is not organized or structured to easily be integrated into such health disciplines as allied health, dental hygiene, nursing and veterinarian technology. Community college nursing programs, for instance, could easily revise their curriculum to include treatment of victims of bioterrorist events that result in acute radiation exposure.
A team of Illinois State faculty will be working on the grant including Cathy Kasseberg, Paulette Miller, Beverly Barham, Lori Woeste, Rod Simmons and Marilyn Morrow. Each of the team members will be focusing on different bioterrorism topics as well as different allied health disciplines. In each case, the bioterrorism knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies will be integrated into existing courses without requiring additional instructional times or resources.
When a Bioterrorism Curriculum Resource Manual is completed, Waterstraat and Fowles will work on the second goal of the project, to promote the use of the manual by health faculty in other community colleges in other states to implement bioterrorism preparedness content into their health-related programs.
The project grant is for three years.