Working in a hospital I have the chance to go through many trainings and classes to continue my education and progress my qualifications and skills.
The most beneficial courses that I found are my BLS/CPR courses. These courses are both online and in person, and require lots of attention to detail because you are tested on them online and in person. We have to retake our BLS certification every two years, which in my opinion is too long, usually I forget the smaller details of BLS and it’s mostly because in the Operating Room I rarely do CPR or use BLS, and only recertifying every two years tends to take away from your knowledge.
Another beneficial course I take also every two years is my NREMT continuing education, this course consists of online only classes with 20 hours instructor led lecture and 20 hours of prerecorded lectures, I find this beneficial because the courses consist of lots of different materials used in EMS, it is a lot of CE hours and takes up lots of time to do, which I find stressful.
Courses that I do not find beneficial are these specific yearly courses that we have to take hospital wide. These are online courses that we have to take every year that talk about non department specific topics, including hazardous waste, emergency codes, infection prevention, and more. It’s a 90 minute course, and the reason I don’t find it beneficial is that the courses you can skip through, and the questions asked are very logical, meaning they are super simple to answer and don’t really require much knowledge on the subject, and I find no benefit in that, as well as the course is repeated every year and over the years you memorize the questions and answers.
Another course I do t find beneficial is a course that we take, it is a iStat and Hemocue machine course, this is an online and in person skills test that we take. I find the online portion very beneficial, yet the in person is not, we use this machine daily, and most days use it more than 3 times a day. We are very well versed in this machine, and every month every employee certified in the machine does a proficiency test, as well as everyday and weekly different machine tests are performed usually by different employees, meaning a in person skill test yearly is very useless when we perform this duty daily, as well as run daily, weekly, and monthly machines checks.
Education and training. MultiCare. (2022, November 1). https://www.multicare.org/forproviders/education-training/
