Ensuring an Infectious Disease Workforce: Education and Training Needs for the 21st Century—Workshop Summary (2006)
The ability of medical and public health workers to respond to infectious disease is critical to national and global health care. However, recent examination of health systems has revealed deficiencies in health professionals' capacities to detect and treat infectious disease. The Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats held a workshop to examine current training programs and discuss new ways to educate and prepare workers to better face challenges brought by infectious disease. The workshop focused specifically on increasing workforce capacity in the United States and in developing countries. Ensuring an Infectious Disease Workforce summarizes this conference, in which participants reviewed current successful training programs, identified specific topics within infectious disease that lack training initiatives, proposed possible alterations in academic programs that would better support infectious disease preparedness, examined the roles of international organizations in training, and discussed whether current government training programs are adequately supported.
