The AAMC, through a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), engaged in a strategic initiative to increase confidence in COVID-19 vaccines and to address medical misinformation and mistrust through health professions education.
Clinicians and learners across the health professions are uniquely positioned to work with their patients and public audiences to address health misinformation. Health care providers are viewed as trusted sources of information and can hold a position of esteem and credibility. This CDC-funded subgrant program supported the initial development of competency-based, interprofessional strategies to mitigate health misinformation and integrate these approaches into new or existing curricula. The goal of these curricular innovations was for learners in medical, nursing, and pharmacy schools to demonstrate improvements in their capacity to communicate about health information and dispel misinformation, myths, and disinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
The schools below were selected as the Health Professions Education Curricular Innovations subgrantees in 2022. The projects selected offer innovative educational approaches and strategies and well-developed plans to ensure that the skills gained in the educational program are transferable to various health topics. The projects are described in more detail in the RTI Press Occasion Paper: Equipping Health Professions Educators to Better Address Medical Misinformation.
| Institution | Project Title |
|---|---|
| Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell | Patients Vulnerable to Misinformation: An Evidence-Based Approach to Address Root Causes Through Medical, Nursing, and Pharmacy Student Training |
| Florida International University Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine | Addressing Vaccine Misinformation: An Online Motivational Interviewing Module and Telehealth Standardized Patient Exercise to Address Misinformation With COVID-19 Vaccine-Hesitant Individuals |
| Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo | Mitigating Medical Misinformation and Mistrust through Effective Team Communication Using Innovative Competency-Based Interprofessional Instructional Design Strategies |
| Maine Medical Center/Tufts University School of Medicine — MaineTrack | Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Learning: A Novel Training Tool for Addressing COVID-19 Health Misinformation |
| The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine | Training Interprofessional Teams to Improve Scientific Communication and Address Health Misinformation in Diverse Communities |
During the second year of the grant program, subgrantees developed a curricular toolkit of competency-based, interprofessional strategies that address health misinformation through education. The toolkit will serve as a collection of resources that health professions educators across diverse institutional settings can use when developing their own curriculum. The tools are generalizable to enable use and implementation across a variety of programs.
Subgrantee teams came together for a collaborative workshop held at the AAMC in September 2023 to work together and share information about their unique projects and the specific resources they will make available through the toolkit. Each of the programs describe their innovative tool in the video below:
More information about the toolkit will be provided here when it is available.
The final stages of the grant program involved two national presentations in November 2023. First, the subgrantee teams each presented their work during Learn Serve Lead 2023: The AAMC Annual Meeting, held in Seattle. Later in November, teams traveled to Durham, North Carolina, to present at the National Forum on Best Practices to Address Health Misinformation, hosted by Duke University School of Medicine, Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and RTI International, in collaboration with the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science.
Contact
For additional information or questions, please contact curricularinnovation@aamc.org.
These projects were funded in part by a cooperative agreement between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) entitled AAMC Improving Clinical and Public Health Outcomes through National Partnerships to Prevent and Control Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Disease Threats (FAIN: NU50CK000586). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The information included in these projects does not necessarily represent the policy of CDC or HHS and should not be considered and endorsement by the Federal Government.