UMN: Bio-Med Library - Public Health

$2.7 Million Grant Will Help Prepare Health Workers

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (October 24, 2005)--The University of Minnesota’s schools of nursing and public health have received a $2.7 million federal grant to educate and train healthcare workers in emergency preparedness, tailoring efforts to the unique needs of specific Minnesota communities as they prepare for a public health emergency or bioterrorism event.

The grant was awarded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Goals of the project are to reduce disease and injury by involving the public health system early in an emergency and by making sure the various health care providers and government units coordinate their efforts. The project will involve organizations from all over the state in an effort called Minnesota Emergency Readiness Education and Training (MERET), which will train approximately 10,000 Minnesota health workers in the next three years, using workshops, speakers, Web casts, videos, and CD-ROMs.

Full Article: http://www.ahc.umn.edu/news/releases/emergencies102405/home.html

Posted by Chad Fennell at 8:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Pursuing a longstanding interest in maternal and fetal health, Courtney Rowland spent last year deeply involved in several key investigations: the role of folic acid in preventing encephalocele (a congenital neural-tube defect), the effects of maternal analgesics on congenital cardiovascular malformations, and the incidence of birth defects among infants born to mothers with the viral disease lymphocytic choriomeningitis.

Those would be formidable assignments for any medical researcher, let alone someone who was still a medical student. But that's what Rowland was (and still is) at the University of Kansas Medical School in Wichita, where she is now in her fourth year.

Rowland's investigations, which gave her a chance to learn first-hand about epidemiological methods and public health, were part of a new fellowship program in applied epidemiology offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga.

Under the program—called "The CDC Experience: Applied Epidemiology Fellowship—eight medical students between their second and third, or third and fourth, years of medical school are selected each year to spend 10 to 12 months at the CDC, where they carry out investigations in areas of public health that interest them. They receive stipends of $17,000 to $20,000. The program is financed by Pfizer Inc. and the Pfizer Foundation through a grant to the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit group designed to facilitate collaboration between the CDC and other organizations.

Full Article: http://www.aamc.org/newsroom/reporter/oct05/fellowships.htm

Posted by Chad Fennell at 12:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Have you written a manuscript that resulted from NIH funding? Has it been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in a journal? If so, you should be aware of the NIH Public Access Policy, which went into effect May 2, 2005.

The NIH Public Access Policy requests its investigators to submit to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of that final manuscript, including all modifications from the peer review process, upon acceptance for publication. A separate submission is not necessary if a manuscript has been accepted by a PubMed Central journal that permits free access within 12 months of publication. (Please refer to this list of these PMC journals.) The policy does not apply to book chapters, letters to the editor, reviews, or editorials. This submission fulfills grant progress reporting requirements by substituting deposit for submission of paper copies of articles.

NIH strongly encourages public release in PubMed Central immediately after the final date of journal publication, but PIs have the option to release their manuscripts at a later time, up to 12 months after publication. You will need to clarify this with your journal publisher. Many publishers are working to revise their author agreement forms to make this more evident. This NIH policy does not change the ability of either the author or the publisher to assert copyright.

NIH has provided the secure NIHMS web site for depositing the manuscripts. The site includes information about the policy and the process. Manuscript files can be uploaded to the system by the PI, or with the author's permission, by a 3rd party designee (such as administrative personnel, librarians, or publishers). To submit a manuscript, no further formatting is necessary beyond that required by the accepting journals. The submission process requires an account for the PI on the NIH eRA Commons or MyNCBI for other designated submitters. Step by step submission instructions have been provided by NIH.

You are encouraged to contact us with your questions and concerns as we work together through the issues of policy implementation. If you have questions about the policy or process, please contact Linda Watson (lwatson@umn.edu), Lisa McGuire (lmcguire@umn.edu) or Kevin Messner (messn006@umn.edu).

-- Linda Watson

Posted by Chad Fennell at 8:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)