A campus-community partnership for farmworkers' health: interventions for tomato workers in Tennessee.

Background: Migrant farm workers are exposed to job hazards in Tennessee, which is among the top five tomato-producing states.

Objectives: This project sought to cultivate and evaluate a partnership to marshal greater resources to address migrants' concerns and to better prepare future health professionals to address occupational issues.

Methods: In the spring of 2008, an interprofessional student-faculty team at a regional university catalyzed a partnership with a clinic for migrants and a national network caring for the itinerant underserved.

An interprofessional educational approach to teaching spiritual assessment.

Spirituality is an essential aspect of a patient's health that can and should be integrated into routine health care. Despite recommendations of accrediting organizations such as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the National Association of Social Workers, and the Association of Professional Chaplains, there is little well defined curriculum focusing on interprofessional spiritual assessment. This article explores one program's use of an interprofessional approach in teaching spiritual assessment to students from medicine, social work, and chaplaincy.

Teaching and learning resilience: building adaptive capacity for rural practice. A report and subsequent analysis of a workshop conducted at the Rural Medical Educators Conference, Savannah, Georgia, May 18, 2010.

Purpose: Resilience, the capacity to endure and overcome hardship, has been suggested as a basic competency for rural medical practice. Unfortunately for physician educators, the medical education literature offers only limited guidance for nurturing this adaptive capacity. We describe the process and subsequent analysis of a daylong curriculum development workshop conducted at the annual meeting of Rural Medical Educators in 2010.

Undergraduate rural medical education program development: focus group consultation with the NRHA Rural Medical Educators Group.

Context: Over a decade ago, leaders in rural medical education established the Rural Medical Educators (RME) Group, an interest group within the National Rural Health Association, to support faculty in rural medical education programs. This group has convened an annual RME conclave since 2006. In 2008, this conclave convened 15 national leaders in rural medical education at The University of Alabama.

Rural health professions education at East Tennessee State University: survey of graduates from the first decade of the community partnership program.

Context: To help meet rural Appalachian needs, and with initial support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, East Tennessee State University partnered with 2 counties to implement a health curriculum for nursing, public health, and medical students in a rural setting.

The financial value of services provided by a rural community health fair.

There has been little discussion in the literature regarding the financial value of the services provided to the participants in health fairs. This article examines the financial value of preventive services provided through a community health fair in an economically depressed area of southwest Virginia. Current Procedural Terminology codes were assigned to the services provided in order to estimate costs participants might incur for such services.

Practice locations of graduates of family physician residency and nurse practitioner programs: considerations within the context of institutional culture and curricular innovation through Titles VII and VIII.

Background: Studies have described the aggregate results of federal funding for health professions education at the national level, but analysis of the long-term impact of institutional participation in these programs has been limited.

Purpose: To describe and assess federally supported curricular innovations at East Tennessee State University designed to promote family medicine and nurse practitioner graduate interest in rural and underserved populations.

Methods: Descriptive analysis of a survey to determine practice locations of nurse practitioner graduates (1992-2002) and graduates of 3 family medicine residencies (1978-2002).

The effect of coloured filters on the rate of reading in an adult student population.

Meares-Irlen Syndrome is characterised by visual stress (visual discomfort) and visual perceptual distortions that can be alleviated by individually prescribed coloured filters. The benefit from coloured filters can be demonstrated with the Wilkins Rate of Reading Test (WRRT). Previous research using individually prescribed coloured overlays (sheets of plastic placed on a page) found that between one-fifth and one-third of unselected school-children show a significant (> 5%) improvement in their rate of reading with their chosen overlay.