Nursing Continuing Education For the 21st Century

One needs and then scan a newspaper or read a weekly magazine to be astounded by how many stories about new medical breakthroughs, disease processes, emerging threats of disease, or innovations in medical and health care technology. The World Health Organization warns us to get ready for a potential worldwide Bird Flu epidemic, terrorists threaten us with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and new protocols for ACLS are released. How is just a working nurse to maintain?

Nursing education provides the basic foundations of medical, scientific, and nursing knowledge, but competence in the nursing profession requires a continuous process of continuing education. CEU for Nurses is essential for the nurse to keep up to date with the most recent practice issues and it is essential for the patient’s safety as well.

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Some states have made RN CEUS for nurses mandatory and need a certain amount of course credit hours to be attained before license renewal, or require certain mandatory course subjects, while other states leave it to the nursing professional themselves to just accept individual responsibility for their very own continued learning. Regardless of whether nursing continuing education courses are mandatory in one’s state or not, all nurses who describe themselves as professionals have to be willing and prepared to implement change in their very own practice by realizing that competence in just about any profession requires periodic updating.

Types of obtaining nursing continuing education hours and the good qualities and cons of each:

1.Professional Journals: Most professional nursing journals offer articles for continuing education credit. Some give you a partial credit hour or one credit hour to readers who fill out an article test after reading this article and mail it in. Though some journals provide the credit for free, others charge $10 or maybe more and in addition to the inconvenience of needing to tear out an article test form and mail it in the nurse does not have any official record of experiencing taken and passed the course. Obtaining continuing education hours through professional journals is costly and inefficient in that the cost of the journal itself must be taken under consideration alongside the cost of the course if you have one, and the full time and expense of mailing in addition to the lack of official record of completion and not enough central maintenance of all credits accumulated by the nurse. Additionally, nurses who count on professional journals due to their CEU hours are normally only subjected to courses related with their own specialty rather than a broader selection of topics that they actually have to be subjected to in the current ever-evolving health care climate.

2.Seminars: Professional development programs and seminars that provide accredited continuing education hours for nurses are frequently offered at various locations in every state, in a few foreign countries, and even on cruises. Employers frequently pay the registration fees for nurses to go to local seminars of short duration such as 1 day, but nurses still need certainly to sacrifice their precious day off to go to them or lose time from work to accomplish so. Furthermore, nurses who attend seminars away from home have to cover their very own travel expenses, hotel bills, and costs of meals. Naturally, cruises and foreign travel are an appealing avenue, but obtaining one’s continuing education by that method is not something every working nurse are able to afford to do.

3.Online Nursing Certificate Programs: The net provides nurses access to extremely affordable and good quality accredited continuing education programs and professional certificate courses covering various professional nursing topics. Online nursing certificate courses would be the gateway to nursing continuing education for the 21st century! Nurses who make the most of online nursing courses are not restricted by geographical barriers, financial hardships, or the inconvenience of taking time from work or family in order to attend courses. Online nursing education courses are plentiful for both mandatory state required subjects, courses in one’s own nursing specialty, and courses that most nurses aside from practice specialty have to be familiar with. Online nursing programs give nurses easy access to a much broader range of subject matters than they ever endured before when restricted primarily to journals or seminars. Along with those benefits, substantial as they are, online nursing courses are inexpensive, up to date with changing trends, can be obtained from the comfort of one’s own home.

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