Integration of the national HIV curriculum in medicine, nursing, and pharmacy programs in the United States.

Abstract

Background: Increasing the number of students who have learned to provide competent HIV care and prevention services is expected to reduce future HIV workforce shortages. To achieve this goal, the Midwest AIDS Training & Education Center (MATEC) at the University of Illinois Chicago embarked on a project to integrate the existing National HIV Curriculum (NHC) into the curricula of accredited graduate programs in medicine, nursing, and pharmacy to enhance the quality of HIV education at 23 health profession programs (HPPs) in the midwestern part of the United States between 2019 and 2022. This article describes the curriculum integration process and presents outcomes at the student level.

Methods: HPPs completed faculty pre- and post-integration surveys for each course in which they integrated content from the NHC. The data from these surveys were used to describe the integration process. After studying material from the NHC, students completed a retrospective endpoint assessment designed to measure changes in knowledge of HIV prevention and care and intent to provide care to people with HIV and those at high risk of HIV in their future careers. All the surveys were created in Qualtrics and administered online. Paired t-tests were performed using SAS v. 9.4 to assess changes in knowledge and intent to work with people with HIV.

Results: The NHC was integrated into 211 courses with an enrollment of 12,822 students. Integration strategies varied by profession discipline, with nursing programs preferring to use online self-study, medicine programs incorporating the NHC in lectures, and pharmacy programs creating learning groups on the NHC's e-learning platform. Students across all three health disciplines reported statistically significant increases in knowledge of HIV prevention and care services and intent to provide care to people with and at high risk of HIV.

Conclusions: The NHC can be successfully integrated into the curricula of HPPs with positive outcomes for students. Given the current shortage of HIV clinicians, this intervention can have a positive impact on expanding the HIV workforce and provide a model for integrating national curricula at the preprofessional graduate level.