The National Tuberculosis Curriculum Consortium: a model of multi-disciplinary educational collaboration

The National Tuberculosis Curriculum Consortium (NTCC) seeks to instill knowledge, skills, and appropriate attitudes in the management and control of tuberculosis (TB) among students in the health professions. Unlike other organizations that have produced quality educational materials aimed at practicing clinicians, public health workers, and the general public, the NTCC is primarily focused on undergraduate and graduate education. The NTCC includes geographically disparate faculty from schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health, respiratory therapy, clinical laboratory sciences, and physician assistant who are experts in the areas of TB, curriculum development, and educational computing. Collaboration occurs through meetings, phone conferences and an innovative web portal that provides a work zone used to develop, organize, and archive products and resources. A critical accomplishment of the Consortium has been the development of core competencies for TB education for graduates in each of the health care disciplines. Those for medical schools are presented in this article. Current NTCC efforts are directed at developing interactive materials for TB education that can be accessed by multi-disciplinary faculty, nationally and abroad. The collaborative effort of the NTCC serves as a model for future endeavors to strengthen curricula, particularly pertaining to health concerns that are best served by multi-disciplinary approaches.