Strategies for effective education in a jail setting: the Tuberculosis Prevention Project.

Jails are a unique setting for health education. The Tuberculosis (TB) Prevention Project was designed to improve completion of care for latent TB infection in released inmates. As part of an ongoing clinical trial to improve rates of completion, educators provided TB-focused educational sessions to 1,027 inmates. This article describes the educational sessions and illustrates some of the barriers to working in a jail setting and strategies to overcome them. The nature of the jail itself, inmate characteristics, the characteristics of educators, and the educational sessions themselves interacted in different ways to enhance or impair the interaction. Jail is a setting in which the population is at high risk for a number of health problems and health education is increasingly important.