Why
How does a large, multistate healthcare organization break down the single-profession silos of accredited CE to embrace interprofessional education and maintain a high standard of quality?
Objectives
- Introduce the application: Purpose and features.
- Demonstrate usability: Guide all course owners through the process of building a robust activity.
- Showcase benefits: Improve activity quality, streamlined planning and enhanced content validity.
- Provide exemplar: How the application has been successfully used by program directors.
At Nemours Children’s Health, we embarked on an interprofessional continuing education journey with our CE teams, aligning stakeholders from various professions across multiple states. We quickly discovered that uniting CE stakeholders accredited by different state boards and organizations, each with different reportable elements and processes, required a compressive level set. Additionally we learned that our CE stakeholders had varied degrees of knowledge and experience with accredited continuing education.
In our organization, education is often planned by activity directors who are not familiar with accreditation criteria. With the limited resources of the CE team, we brought together nursing and physician stakeholders to compose an activity application that aimed to establish a common set of criteria in a process that maintained the standards set for CE activities. Our electronic application guides program directors of all experience levels, in all profession types, to create robust and effective activities with ease.
What sets our application apart is its comprehensive approach, including a detailed program description, a thorough planning checklist, a curriculum design section, a control of content form, and resources to build quality objectives and ensure content validity. Our activity application guides activity directors through various elements of planning to critically think through the design of an activity while meeting the standards for accredited CE.
As a first step, the activity directors must engage an interprofessional activity planning committee to determine the sources of the professional practice gap among the healthcare team and identify the gaps as knowledge, skill, strategy or performance related. These gaps are identified through various methods such as surveys, feedback, performance metrics, patient outcomes, evidence-based literature or direct observation.
Once the interprofessional practice gaps are identified, the planners define the educational needs that underlie these gaps. The educational needs could be in the form of knowledge, skills/strategy or performance improvements. With these gaps identified, the planners then formulate precise learning objectives with the aid of Bloom’s Taxonomy. These objectives articulate the knowledge skills/strategies or performance outcomes that the healthcare team will acquire or enhance through the CE activity. Our activity application collects this information at the start of the planning.
We have found that Nemours Children’s Health CE planners design interprofessional continuing education (IPCE) activities to bridge the gap between current professional practice and the ideal or desired practices with the activity planning process embedded in the CE application. The application includes many checkbox lists to prompt planners toward IPCE when applicable.
By following this approach, the planning committee ensures that the learning activities are not only informative, but also practical and relevant to the healthcare team members’ professional practice. Additionally, each planned activity meets the standards of accredited continuing education while providing the CE program stakeholders with the necessary elements for reaccreditation.
One of the most compelling examples of its success is its use by novice educators who are new to planning educational activities and may feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the process. For novice educators, the application serves as a comprehensive guide, walking them through each step of planning an activity. It provides prompts, ensuring that all necessary standards and requirements are met. This structured approach helps novice educators become more knowledgeable of the essential components of a successful educational activity, from defining learning objectives to ensuring content validity. Additionally, our team is always on standby, available to support all applicants. As for financial relationship disclosures, mitigations and management of commercial support, our experienced CE team directs those more complex elements of CE planning.
In conclusion, the meticulous process of gathering standards for each accredited continuing education activity through the application not only ensures compliance but also enhances the quality of education provided. By systematically collecting data on educational content, objectives and participant feedback, we can more effectively evaluate learner outcomes as compared to identified education gaps. This approach allows us to continuously improve our educational offerings, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of our learners and lead to better professional practice and patient care.
To adapt our continuing education application blueprint to your organization's application, consider integrating key elements of planning and design into your current application. The integration of targeted components can enhance the effectiveness and relevance of your educational initiatives.
Kelly Carlson Eberbach DNP, MBA, RN, CPN, CPEN, is a nurse, educator and continuing education specialist with a strong background in pediatric healthcare and nursing education. Kelly joined the Nemours Children’s Health Continuing Education department to help the organization achieve Joint Accreditation. With experience in patient care and a passion for professional development, Kelly focuses on improving educational programs to meet accreditation standards, mentoring novice educators, and expanding activities to meet the needs of the interprofessional team. Kelly leverages skills in data analysis, project management and teamwork to support healthcare professionals in developing effective and impactful learning experiences for the healthcare team.