Educating Health Professionals about Disability: A Review of Interventions

Health professionals need to understand the human rights and health needs of disabled people. This review of evidence on interventions demonstrates that a range of often innovative approaches have been trialled. Lectures by faculty are less effective in changing attitudes than contact with disabled people themselves. Existing examples of good practice need to be scaled up, and better and more long-term evaluations of impact are required

A curriculum to teach medical students to care for people with disabilities: development and initial implementation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Lack of knowledge and skills, and negative attitudes towards patients with disabilities, may adversely affect the services available to this group and negatively affect their health outcomes. The objective of this paper is to describe the development and initial implementation of a curriculum for teaching medical students to care for patients with disabilities.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We followed the six-step approach for developing curricula for medical education: general needs assessment, specific needs assessment, defining goals and objectives, determining the educational strategies, planning the implementation, and developing an evaluation plan.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The curriculum has well defined goals and objectives covering knowledge, attitudes and skills. It employs both traditional and non-traditional teaching strategies. The implementation is planned over the four-year medical school curriculum in collaboration with a number of academic departments and specialized community-based agencies. The curriculum evaluation includes an attitudinal survey which is administered using a controlled design (pre- and post- exposure to the curriculum). The initial implementation of the curriculum has been very successful.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We have developed a longitudinal curriculum to teach medical students to care for people with disabilities. A rigorous evaluation of the impact of the curriculum is needed.</p

The personal and contextual contributors to school belongingness among primary school students

School belongingness has gained currency among educators and school health professionals as an important determinant of adolescent health. The current cross-sectional study presents the 15 most significant personal and contextual factors that collectively explain 66.4% (two-thirds) of the variability in 12-year old students' perceptions of belongingness in primary school. The study is part of a larger longitudinal study investigating the factors associated with student adjustment in the transition from primary to secondary school. The study found that girls and students with disabilities had higher school belongingness scores than boys, and their typically developing counterparts respectively; and explained 2.5% of the variability in school belongingness. The majority (47.1% out of 66.4%) of the variability in school belongingness was explained by student personal factors, such as social acceptance, physical appearance competence, coping skills, and social affiliation motivation; followed by parental expectations (3% out of 66.4%), and school-based factors (13.9% out of 66.4%) such as, classroom involvement, task-goal structure, autonomy provision, cultural pluralism, and absence of bullying. Each of the identified contributors of primary school belongingness can be shaped through interventions, system changes, or policy reforms

Metabolic imaging of patients with prostate cancer using hyperpolarized [1-¹³C]pyruvate.

This first-in-man imaging study evaluated the safety and feasibility of hyperpolarized [1-(13)C]pyruvate as an agent for noninvasively characterizing alterations in tumor metabolism for patients with prostate cancer. Imaging living systems with hyperpolarized agents can result in more than 10,000-fold enhancement in signal relative to conventional magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. When combined with the rapid acquisition of in vivo (13)C MR data, it is possible to evaluate the distribution of agents such as [1-(13)C]pyruvate and its metabolic products lactate, alanine, and bicarbonate in a matter of seconds. Preclinical studies in cancer models have detected elevated levels of hyperpolarized [1-(13)C]lactate in tumor, with the ratio of [1-(13)C]lactate/[1-(13)C]pyruvate being increased in high-grade tumors and decreased after successful treatment. Translation of this technology into humans was achieved by modifying the instrument that generates the hyperpolarized agent, constructing specialized radio frequency coils to detect (13)C nuclei, and developing new pulse sequences to efficiently capture the signal. The study population comprised patients with biopsy-proven prostate cancer, with 31 subjects being injected with hyperpolarized [1-(13)C]pyruvate. The median time to deliver the agent was 66 s, and uptake was observed about 20 s after injection. No dose-limiting toxicities were observed, and the highest dose (0.43 ml/kg of 230 mM agent) gave the best signal-to-noise ratio for hyperpolarized [1-(13)C]pyruvate. The results were extremely promising in not only confirming the safety of the agent but also showing elevated [1-(13)C]lactate/[1-(13)C]pyruvate in regions of biopsy-proven cancer. These findings will be valuable for noninvasive cancer diagnosis and treatment monitoring in future clinical trials