Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #118092

Wendy A. Ritch, MA, MTS, Preventive Medicine & Community Health, University of Medicine & Dentistry of NJ, 185 S. Orange Ave, MSB Room F506, Newark, NJ 07101-1709, 973-972-7479, ritchwe@umdnj.edu

Purpose: To discuss the ethical challenges inherent in creating and empowering a federally-funded consortium, which is comprised of entities with competing interests, to educate and train New Jersey's health care professionals in the areas of counter-terrorism and public health preparedness.

Methods: Data were collected and analyzed from conversations with key informants, grant and subcontractor proposals and budgets, consortium member reports, meeting minutes and observations, training assessments and other sources.

Results: The NJ Preparedness Training Consortium (NJ-PTC), vis-à-vis the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), was one of 19 grantees of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration's Bioterrorism Training and Curriculum Development Program (HRSA; BTCDP). Over a two-year period, from October 2003 through September 2005, the NJ-PTC committed to training several thousand health care professionals throughout NJ in counter-terrorism and public health preparedness. After fifteen months of grant-supported activity, the NJ-PTC's fourteen partners had trained fewer than one thousand of NJ's health care professionals.

Conclusion: Although the creation and implementation of any new program takes a considerable amount of time and effort, the ethical challenges of consortium-building, particularly among partners who typically compete with one another for scarce resources of all kinds, proved both time-consuming and ultimately very rewarding. In spite of the considerable obstacles, now that the NJ-PTC has found its momentum it seems likely that it will meet and possibly exceed its originally-proposed set of training targets.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this session participants will be able to

• Identify the primary ethical challenges involved in consortium-building among professional competitors;
• Discuss how the NJ-PTC dealt with these ethical challenges; and
• Apply "lessons learned" from the case study of the NJ-PTC to other entities that have similar goals yet face similar ethical challenges.

Keywords: Ethics, Bioterrorism

Related Web page: www.nj-ptc.org

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commertial supporters WITH THE EXCEPTION OF I am the Project Manager for the NJ Preparedness Training Consortium, which is funded by HRSA grant #T01HP01407..

Recorded presentation