The above links will take you to the Center for the Health Professions site.

Curricular Materials

The Network offers curricula and trainings that promote improvement in the quality of care. A variety of publications and internet-based learning materials are available. For more detailed information about the curricula please contact Lisa Leiva at lisao@itsa.ucsf.edu

Toward Culturally Competent Care: A Toolbox for Teaching Communication Strategies
Lead Author: Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP
This 170-page curriculum is a toolbox of materials for teaching culturally competent skills needed for practical day-to-day encounters between clinicians and patients. The materials can be adapted for sequential one-hour sessions or for daylong seminars. The goals of the curriculum are to teach participants to recognize when cultural differences exist in patient encounters and to use specific communication skills to elicit their patients' cultural perspectives about health and illness. The curriculum includes specific instructions to faculty, didactic and experiential sessions and all handouts and overheads.

Discussing Tough Issues With Patients: Managing Unreasonable Requests, Mistakes, and Conflicts of Interest
Grantee: Thomas Gallagher, MD, Washington University School of Medicine
In an environment of shrinking health care resources and patients' changing expectations of their clinicians, effective communication is critical in maintaining the doctor-patient relationship. This curriculum provides clinicians with focused training in discussing difficult issues with their patients. It uses a combination of brief didactic sessions interspersed with experiential activities in which participants practice new approaches to discussing difficult issues with their patients.

Core Learning for Improving Care - available in 2003
Grantee: Linda A. Headrick, MD, MS, Case Western Reserve/MetroHealth Medical Center
This curriculum uses internet-based learning and teaching materials to speed the diffusion of health care improvement knowledge. Nine self-study internet-based learning modules have been peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary editorial board of practicing clinicians, technical experts and internationally known practitioners and educators in health care improvement. The web-based modules will be available in 2003 and are free of charge except for a small fee for CMEs.

Evidence-Based Shared Decision-Making in Adult Primary Care
Grantee: David Price, MD, FAAFP, Permanente Medical Group/University of Colorado
Most clinicians cite time constraints as a major barrier to practicing shared decision-making (SDM). This curriculum and toolkit help clinicians incorporate evidence-based medicine (EBM) and SDM into their practices. Four clinical topics are highlighted where the "best course" is unclear and inclusion of patient preferences is essential: mammography screening for breast cancer in women ages 40-49; prostate cancer screening for men over 50 using prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing; hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for post-menopausal women; and antidepressant and/or psychotherapy. The curriculum includes videotaped lectures combined with experiential exercises.

Best Practices for Busy Clinicians: Applying Continuous
Quality Improvement in Practice
Grantee: Peter Rudd, MD, FACP, Stanford University Medical Center
This curriculum uses continuous quality improvement (CQI) as a central focus for teaching clinicians to learn the core concepts and skills to initiate, implement and expand local programs of "best practices." It includes ten web-based, self-paced modules on CQI principles and techniques coupled with two small group sessions. Each module includes specific learning objectives, summaries of major points and self-assessment quizzes.

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