The Montana AHEC Program Office (and 4 other awardee AHECs) recently received a small grant to implement Project SHARE, which is a comprehensive Health Information Literacy curriculum.

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Project SHARE will be implemented at Ronan High School and embedded into their Health Science class. Additionally, portions of the curriculum will be utilized at the Montana HOSA State Leadership Conference and MedStart summer camps throughout the state.

The aims of Project SHARE are to:

  • Empower high school students as community health advocates
  • Increase high school students knowledge and interest of health careers
  • Promote improved health and reduce health disparities
  • Increase the ability to access valid and reliable health information while effectively evaluating that information

This project is supported by funds awarded to National AHEC Organization from the National Library of Medicine through the Center for Public Service Communication.

From the office of National AHEC Organization Executive Director, Robert Trachtenberg -- Today's post wraps up project awardee introductions with a shout out to the Montana AHEC Program Offfice. Naturally, the shout needs to be extremely loud, because distances between non-frontier regions in Montana are almost inconceivably large. For efficiency's sake, the Montana AHEC Program office is fortunate to be co-located with the Montana Office for Public Instruction (OPI) which has responsibility for approving the statewide Health Occupation Students of America/Future Health Professionals (HOSA) curriculum and for managing its funds. In collaboration with OPI and with existing school partnerships, Montana's health project will leverage the existing HOSA curriculum and structure to build a cadre of youth advocates for health information literacy. Despite the frontier nature and large distances, utilizing the existing HOSA program connection will allow Montana's youth advocates to reach nearly 350 additional peers to introduce them to health information literacy. Further, t! he intended cadre of youth come from a high school on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Nation. Montana AHEC's ability to serve this marginalized population makes its inclusion in National Library of Medicine (NLM) project all the more valuable.

Each of the awardee AHECs brings a special culture, mix of staff experiences, and environmental contexts that brings important diversity to the learning collaborative established by the NLM, Center for Public Service Communication, and NAO.

Please visit the National AHEC Organization website for even more information about this project!