Training to prepare human health undergraduate students to respond to biological incidents.

Academics with experience from the field during the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak (West Africa) have created basic competences to train human health science students how to respond to chemical/biological incidents following major competences recently identified by the European Commission and distributed them into six domains: identification of the risk and risk analysis; toxicological effect of chemical/biological agents; planning and organisation of an intervention programme; environmental planning; communication and information management; safety and personal protective equipment; societal and ethical reflections. We have developed a brief educational programme composed of different training sessions (lectures and research-led workshops), which cover each of the different phases of an appropriate response to any of these incidents. The biological training was tested in different programmes at De Montfort University (UK) in 2016/17: BSc Biomedical Science (BMS; n=121) and Medical Science (BMedSci; n=24). Biomedical scientists are critical for provision of an appropriate response to these events, as early diagnosis is of paramount importance to contain the spread of hazards and for patient care. The training developed seemed successful in providing these students with the created competences. Thus, 93.1% of BMS students indicated that they acquired some knowledge of prevention and preparedness against a biological incident (63% agreed; 30.1% strongly agreed); and 94.8% reported that they learnt how to establish some public health interventions to protect humans in the aftermath of a biological incident (63.2% agreed; 31.6% strongly agreed). In relation to the BMedSci students, only 6.7% of them highlighted that they did not learn how to tailor a remedial programme and nearly 70% reported that the use of the “UK Recovery Handbook for Biological Incidents” (Public Health England, 2015) was an appropriate resource for tailoring a recovery response and aided their environmental recovery learning. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at introducing basic training to respond to biological incidents in an undergraduate programme. Finally, this training could easily be adapted and introduced into other health science programmes to provide this relevant training to future health professionals.