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Monday, July 30, 2007

Continuing Education Credits

Is it just me or does anyone else find our CE requirements to be annoying and pointless? I don't really learn anything from them most of the time that I had not read on my own. Let us also not forget the corporate sponsored judicious bias toward their particular billion-dollar-a-year-making drug and the other modules that people wrote so that they feel important.

The proper way to "educate" the already educated is a well-structured, non-biased module that contains diagnosis, treatment options (chemical, physical, and mental where applicable), and monitoring parameters for the disease state and treatments.

I do not need a bunch of boring statistical, historical, or trivial factoids sprawled out in an article, especially if these are the things you are asking about in the "test." I need the facts and only the facts that apply to treating patients in the real world. The rest is a waste of my precious time that is devoted mainly to answering the difficult and potentially life threatening questions about how to start or stop poop (or in the heated debate with a manager last night: Who got more tail? Kenny Loggins or Peter Cetera? We came up with Kenny Loggins because he had songs in Top Gun and Footloose but I digress...).

To sum it up, I want my CEs to read like a chapter in The Handbook of Applied Therapeutics with the excess left off. Remember, we just need the facts.

6 comments:

jess said...

Does the state you practice in have a Live CE requirement? I find Live CE to be the most useless, hard to find, and expensive CE that there is. I find that the bias is taken to an almost transcedental level, worse than with regular CE. The state I practice in doesn't have a Live CE requirement, thank God, but one of my licenses has that requirement. I'm seriously letting that license lapse.

Anonymous said...

I always thought that the best CE courses were the ones that take place at the nice restaurants with the free dinners. Give me free food and I'm your guy.I'll even ignore the bias if there is cheesecake.

Big 'N Tasty RPH said...

Yes, Florida requires 10 hours of live CE every 2 years. I prefer the "vacation" CE's, even if they cost $500.

Anonymous said...

sorry but in my state there is a live CE requirement. If your not having a good time at these you are missing the point. Granted most of the ones I attend have been relatively free of bias but so what? now you know why docs sometimes lose their minds when prescribing. Hint-attend sat. nite CE and then close down the local watering hole with your peers. The Sunday CE with a little blurred vision makes it much easier (if longer) to take.

Mother Jones RN said...

CEU classes are usually worthless. They were invented by people who found a way of getting rich quick.

Anonymous said...

A group of us in the midwest are participating in a continuing education model used in UK, and our program comes from info from Canada. I think it's called CPD. We systematically assess what background we've accumulated and our learning styles (what are our interestes?), decide what direction we'd like to take pro-actively for improving our knowledge basis, and go after the appropriate CE out there to develop areas of expertise in our area of interest. It's been a great experience. The program is being piloted/tested in Wisconsin, Ohio or Iowa, Indiana, and a couple other states. In Canada, the documentation is kept up to date in a notebook which serves as a basis for periodic CE audits.