And that means everyone is scrambling to get their continuing education hours in. (For the record, mine are done, paperwork is in, and Registry is renewed for another two year cycle.)
But this got me to thinking about continuing education. There seems to be a real conflict between continuing education and refresher. Refresher, at least to me, means a review of previously obtained knowledge. Continuing education, at least in the professional world, implies education designed to expand on previously obtained knowledge. In other words, you’re supposed to be learning about what’s changed in your profession.
And there’s the conflict. Too many of us in EMS see maintaining our certification as merely maintaining our current knowledge base. And it’s so easy to do with a recertification process that makes it easy to take the same card courses and even the same continuing education courses year after year. In fact, if anything, the current process means its actually less of a headache to take card courses than to find the exact courses you need to cover the relevant topics for the refresher requirement. And for most of us, present company included, that’s often a headache we don’t want to deal with.
My solution? Simple. Let’s have a short refresher course on high-acuity, low-volume skills coupled with an update on core topics in EMS care and mandate actual continuing education that expands on, rather than repeats, initial EMS education. There should also be a requirement that continuing education hours not be repeated in multiple renewal cycles. Further, I believe that certain infrequently practiced skills (e.g.: intubation) should be refreshed in a skills lab or clinical environment. (Speaking of which, wouldn’t it be incredible if we had a process for currently certified EMS professionals to go back into a clinical setting to get additional exposure to certain skills to maintain mastery?) And as convenient as it is to have all of the continuing education done in house, it also creates an environment where the education and the presenters become stale. Take the time to truly expand your knowledge base by expanding where you get your continuing education, whether it be from another EMS organization or an EMS conference. While you may not get extra hours of credit, the expanded networking and differing views are guaranteed to make you a better provider.
It’s time for medics renewing their certification to be learning about current medicine rather than rehashing dated medicine — or worse yet, dogma.
You know that traditional refresher and CEU format is no more, right? The National Continued Competency Program has National, Local, and Individual requirements.
Those National requirements are updated every 4 years, and it’s hard to get them all in your typical card courses. Not to mention that you’d be wasting a bunch of time doing so.
Not every state has adopted the National Continued Competency Program yet….