Students learn public health, zombie style

By Sarah Marshall 
Contributions from Christopher Austin

Flesh eating horrors roam the streets of the city as members of the DoD’s Humanitarian Health International Team (HHIT) search for survivors of the zombie plague.

This is one of the fictional scenarios being used to teach students at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences's (USU) Graduate School of Nursing (GSN). It’s part of the online population health course being taught to students in the Family Nurse Practitioner Doctorate of Nursing Practice (DNP) program, which teaches students the key principals of responding to, and understanding, population health.

The course has students apply what they learn about caring for communities through debate, small group work, and a series of creative scenarios – in this case, acting as the fictitious HHIT as they deal with a zombie outbreak.

“We use the narrative device of a zombie pandemic in animations and assignments to help engage students in content,” said Catherine Ling, former assistant professor and Family Nurse Practitioner for the DNP and Ph.D. programs in the GSN. She helped design the curriculum, and her imaginative efforts have earned her the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award for 2015, which recognizes educators from institutions around the world for their excellence in teaching and learning.

Students use their knowledge to enact a plan to deal with the outbreak while following real-world DoD guidelines. (Image Credit: Education & Technology Innovation Support Office)

To immerse themselves in the scenario, students watch video clips created by USU’s Education& Technology Innovation Support Office (ETI), which also had a part in designing the curriculum. These show the impact the fictitious zombie virus has had on the population, along with the fear it’s created. The fictitious President gives a “State of the Zombie Pandemic” address, anti-zombie propaganda posters are strewn across the city, and Service members track down zombies so they can be treated.

Though this is a more desperate situation than most military health providers will ever expect to find themselves in, they are still expected to follow DoD regulations. Ling explained that students have to enact a quarantine, administer widespread vaccines, and obtain international resources to help combat the outbreak.

The zombie coursework keeps the material interesting, and the underlying zombie theme throughout each lesson in the public health module helps make the lessons more cohesive, she said. This narrative cohesion makes it easier to remember the material, and apply it in the event of any real-life population emergency.

 

(Image Credit: Education & Technology Innovation Support Office)

“The videos are very tastefully done,” said Air Force Capt. Marcie Hart, one of the students who took the course. “The ‘infected’ can be cured later in the scenario, so the characters are not using deadly force, and it is not overtly violent.”

The videos are suspenseful and exciting, Hart continued. They take the somewhat scholastic, abstract information of the course and make it interesting and concrete.

Outbreaks of flesh-eating ghouls are threats confined to fiction, but the challenge that these scenarios provide forces military medical students to think creatively, preparing them for just about anything they’ll face in the future.