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- News
Release
- Sept. 29,
2004
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For more
information:
- Nicki Hilliard,
PharmD, BCNP
- 501-686-6398
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- UAMS
and UNM Nuclear Education Online Program Receives
- Federal
Education Grant
LITTLE ROCK – The Nuclear Education
Online (NEO) program at the University of Arkansas for Medical
Sciences (UAMS) has received a $440,861 grant to help expand its
computer-based training to new fields of study and serve as a
model for developing other medical training programs.
The grant, awarded by the Fund for
the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) through the U.S.
Department of Education, will allow UAMS and
its NEO program partner, the
University of New Mexico, to train physicians, radiochemists,
pharmacists and technologists across the country in nuclear cardiology
and positron emission tomography, a procedure that shows detailed
images of internal organs.
The FIPSE grant is awarded to
innovative projects that hold promise as models for the resolution of
important issues and problems in postsecondary education.
The grant will run three years, with
$189,423 being awarded for the first year. The entire project will
cost $767,000, with the FIPSE grant providing 57 percent of the
funding and the remainder covered by non-federal sources.
“This grant can potentially impact
more than 500 programs, serving several thousand students and health
care professionals in need of specialized nuclear medicine training,”
said Nicki Hilliard, Pharm.D., associate professor of pharmacy in the
UAMS College of Pharmacy. Hilliard wrote the grant proposal, “An
Interdisciplinary Distance Educational Model for Specialty Education
to Meet Training Needs of Healthcare Professionals.”
Nuclear
Education Online (www.nuclearonline.org)
is an educational consortium between UAMS and the University of
New Mexico. Each
institution’s faculty collaborated to design an online didactic
curriculum and experiential training materials. Colleges
are able to offer nuclear education courses to students
as part of their elective course offerings and nuclear
pharmacies throughout the world will be able to train
new pharmacists without the expense and
inconvenience of travel.
Programs that will benefit from
this project include cardiology and nuclear medicine residencies,
pharmacy schools, health physics and employee training. Once NEO is
set up for these disciplines, the model will be made available to
programs in other disciplines via workshops, interactive conferencing
methods and peer-reviewed publications, Hilliard said.
To achieve these goals, the NEO
project staff will redesign specialized courses for other health care
disciplines and market these courses to other specialized fields of
study requiring nuclear education. The staff then will share knowledge
of the model with other institutions.
The project is unique in that it
targets institutions that have not fully utilized distance education.
It combines distance learning with problem-based learning and training
at clinical sites. By doing this, it increases access to highly
specialized training programs, minimizes institutional overlap and
maximizes the use of technology, making it an extremely cost-effective
method for delivering education.
More than 16 million nuclear
medicine imaging and therapeutic procedures are performed annually in
the U.S. These procedures provide information about the
functioning of nearly every major organ system. Of these procedures,
40 percent to 50 percent assess cardiac function and 35 percent to 40
percent aid in diagnosing cancers. As the population ages,
patient demand for such procedures will increase.
Specialized training is required
for health care professionals to handle the radioactive materials used
in nuclear medicine procedures. There are critical shortages of
programs and educators to train the number of nuclear medicine health
care professionals needed. Nuclear medicine professionals have
identified the ongoing shortage of qualified staff as one of the
biggest threats to their profession.
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