Schools of Public Health Should be Accredited for, and Teach the Principles and Practice of Point-of-Care Testing.

Abstract

Institutions offering public health education, especially those with epidemiology and preparedness concentrations, should be accredited for, and teach the principles and practice of point-of-care testing (POCT)3 (1–4) to enhance emergency preparedness, community resilience, and global response to disasters, complex crises, and outbreaks of highly infectious diseases. ### Rationale Enabling public health practitioners to use POCT will improve standards of crisis care and strengthen community resilience, especially in limited-resource settings (3). Public health services optimized geospatially can accelerate treatment, for example, by using POC cardiac troponin testing to rule in the diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction in rural settings, such as Thua Thien Hue Province in Central Vietnam (5). Early decision-making at points of need will help stop outbreaks of highly infectious diseases like Ebola virus disease (Ebola) (6–8), which recently crossed borders from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Critically ill patients must receive POCT support in isolation. Patients exposed in Africa and subsequently presenting suspicious for infection at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and Uppsala University Hospital in Stockholm in 2018–19 reaffirm that outbreaks must be stopped where they start. ### Education status A national survey published in Frontiers of Public Health showed that no schools or colleges of public health systematically teach POCT, nor are they encouraged to …