Skill-Building Institutes

The American College of Preventive Medicine is offering several intensive skill-building institutes at Preventive Medicine 2008. Each institute offers 4 to 7 hours of Continuing Medical Education (CME) credit and they include: 

  • Preventive Medicine Review Institute: The Preventive Medicine Review Institute will be a review of Chronic Disease and Clinical Preventive Medicine infectious Disease in preparation of the Board Exam.
     
  • Setting Up a Lifestyle-Modification Strategy in the Clinical Office: This institute will provide knowledge and exposure to different lifestyle modification strategies to enable physicians to effectively decrease their patients’ risk of developing cardiovascular disease. This session, designed for primary care physicians, health care administrations, academic physicians, and trainees, will describe currently available lifestyle interventions, tools, and strategies. Participants will be able to try out the different tools and intervention techniques, using small group discussions, videos, and practice sessions. Concentrating on smoking cessation programs, diabetes management, and obesity prevention, the challenges of initiating and maintaining the different intervention programs will be examined, and the session will conclude with a tutorial on how to best choose the most cost-effective strategy to monitor these controllable risk factors in various clinical settings. 
     
  • Local Health Authority Workshop: Public leaders from the state of Texas and city of Austin will lead an interactive/case driven workshop on issues affecting citizens in Texas, including Austin specific issues.  Topics include quarantine issues, TB, hepatitis A, food borne outbreak, dealing with the media, and public health role in disasters.
     
  • Advocacy Skill Building: In this half day workshop, participants will develop and practice skills in policy development and advocacy. Skills and topics to be addressed in the institute include: assessing policy needs; tracking the policy process; writing policy; coalition building; contacting/cultivating support from legislators; policy adoption; policy implementation; monitoring/evaluating policy effectiveness; using science effectively; and guidelines for participation in the policy/advocacy process by public employees. Participants will have the opportunity to apply these concepts using current or recent federal or state legislation. Skills covered in this workshop are broadly applicable to policy development and advocacy in a variety of settings and at all levels of governance. This workshop is appropriate for people at all skill levels and with varying amounts of experience participating in the policy process.
     
  • Preventive Services Tool Kit Workshop:This Institute will not duplicate the congressional advocacy content of the morning Institute. We will address advocacy strategy and implementation, primarily at state, local and health facility levels. We will include a special segment to present the ACPM Board with proposed enhancements to their advocacy agenda to enhance the future prospects of the specialty of Preventive Medicine.  This case-based and problem-oriented Policy/Advocacy Institute will teach policy and advocacy skills drawn from political science, organizational development, and public administration – then adapted by the PSTK Team for public health and healthcare settings.  
     
  • How to Use Data to Improve Quality:  Is Safety different from Quality?  What measures and codes to use for Quality based reimbursement?  Interactive Case Study workshop with tools and applications for everyday use!   Physician, System and Health plan based learning modules.
     
  • Putting Undergraduate Public Health Into Practice Undergraduate Public Health Education- Skills Building Institute: The Undergraduate Public Health Skills Building Institute will provide hands-on small group workshops in a choice of three core courses being recommended for all colleges and universities “Public Health 101”, “Epidemiology 101”, “Global Health 101”. These sessions will be led by Richard Riegelman, Mark Kaelin, Victor Barbiero respectively. Participants in the “101” courses will receive and use curriculum frameworks and learning outcomes as well as materials to illustrate the frameworks. Suzanne Cashman will lead a workshop on Service-Learning in Health that will assist public health practitioners to maximize the benefits of community based experiences.  Undergraduate public health resources available at www.teachpublichealth.org and on PERC will also be illustrated.
     
  • Health Care Disparities: Closing the Gap: Sponsored by the Commission to End Health Care Disparities, this three hour workshop trains physicians on effective solutions that they can use in their clinical practices to improve the quality of care for racial and ethnic minority patients.  A highly interactive workshop, participants will discuss the magnitude and causes of health care disparities and work in small groups to identify strategies for how they can implement a specific set of solutions.