BACKGROUND: Each year foodborne diseases cause illness in approximately 1 in 6 Americans, resulting in 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths. Insufficient resources and capacity at state and local health departments negatively affects the completeness and timeliness of case investigations and decrease their ability to participate in local and multijurisdictional outbreak response activities. Foodborne Diseases Centers for Outbreak Response Enhancement (FoodCORE) centers work together to develop better methods to detect, investigate, respond to, and control foodborne outbreaks and to identify and document replicable model practices. The current FoodCORE centers are Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York City, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin.
METHODS: To address workforce needs, state and local health departments have partnered with academic institutions to build and train student teams that can provide temporary surge capacity or are integrated into their surveillance and outbreak teams. In some health departments, student volunteers have provided short-term surge capacity during specific events that require immediate responses; in other jurisdictions, paid student teams have been established to support daily surveillance and outbreak investigation work, not just surge capacity. The specific roles and responsibilities of student teams vary across jurisdictions and have included conducting routine case-patient interviews, assisting with surge capacity during a response to a specific outbreak or event, data entry and analysis, and special projects.
RESULTS: With the help of student teams, FoodCORE centers have attempted to interview an average of 99% of Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli, and Listeria patients while continuing to reduce the average time to attempt an interview from 3.7 days to 0.9 days. The FoodCORE Model Practice on Student Interview Teams describes the practices used in FoodCORE centers to establish, train, maintain, and evaluate a team of students to support routine surveillance activities and provide surge capacity during outbreak investigations. The model practice describes successful strategies for incorporating student interview teams into foodborne disease surveillance activities and provides tips and resources for operating a student team based on the experience of the FoodCORE centers.
CONCLUSIONS: The establishment of student teams has been demonstrated to be a successful model for addressing gaps in capacity and expanding the range and depth of surveillance and response activities in both centralized and decentralized jurisdictions. Incorporating long-term, paid student teams into routine health department activities has the added benefits of addressing capacity needs for routine response activities as well as supporting workforce development and training needs for future public health professionals.