Make Continuing Education in Healthcare Easy!

This blog is taken from a recent HealthStream webinar entitled “Make CE Easy!” The webinar was moderated by Jill Lamle and featured Jennifer Maguire, MBA, RN. Maguire is a Senior Solution Executive, Clinical Staff Development for HealthStream.

Mandatory training shouldn’t feel like a burden to staff and should help mitigate not exacerbate employee burnout and stress. Healthcare leaders also want to ensure that their staff has access to the most current, evidence-based content. Maguire shared ways in which healthcare organizations can create a learning culture, while improving recruitment, retention, and engagement efforts by using tools that are efficient and easy-to-use for staff and leaders.

A Strategic Approach to the Healthcare Workforce Crisis 

Maguire began by describing how HealthStream can support organizations as they strive to create a culture of lifelong learning. HealthStream has tools to support workforce development, scheduling, and capacity management, as well as credentialing. HealthStream has tools for nurses and other healthcare providers for virtually every stage of their careers from student to specialty certification to nurse manager.

Maguire pointed to the healthcare industry’s current staffing challenges including high turnover and severe staffing shortages as an indicator that it is more important than ever for healthcare organizations to find ways to create engaged employees. “It is absolutely essential to ensure that your clinical workforce is engaged, competent and confident. A strategic way to accomplish this is to engage these clinicians at each stage of their careers with the resources that they need,” said Maguire.

In addition, Millennial and Gen Z employees have a somewhat different expectation of work than that of their predecessors. These cohorts want to feel as if they are making a difference and to find meaningful work that aligns with their personal values. HealthStream can help your organization connect with and engage these employees at every step of their careers by helping your organization to demonstrate an investment of time and resources into their professional journeys.

Aligning Resources with Goals

HealthStream’s CE Unlimited is the perfect tool to help healthcare leaders align organizational goals for clinical education and to create a culture of lifelong learning that supports the personal and professional goals of clinical staff. CE Unlimited has inclusive and versatile content that includes more than 2,000+ CE titles across multiple disciplines, settings, and specialties for both nursing and allied health professionals. In addition, there are more than 40 certification prep programs to support your staff in their clinical advancement.

CE Unlimited is a learner-focused tool. Maguire shared that there were multiple modalities to meet each users individual learning needs. CE Unlimited includes everything from evidence-based articles to interactive eLearning, on-screen simulations, and micro-learning for shorter “bursts” of learning.

The courses are always availalbe to your staff with unliited use, and they can access the CertPrep courses via a free mobile app. In addition, CE Unlimited tracks CE credits making reporting and administration easier and more accurate and efficient for your team. Healthcare organizations can use CE Unlimited regardless of whether or not they are currently using HealthStream’s learning management system.

HealthStream also offers an upgraded CE Unlimited package – CE Unlimited with Jane®. “This package includes a robust set of knowledge assessments for nursing and some allied health professionals. Based on these assessments, they will then be provided with an individualized remedial path that addresses any knowledge gaps identified in the assessments,” said Maguire.

Demonstrated Cost Savings and CE Convenience

Columbia Memorial Health in Hudson, New York began using CE Unlimited and in the very first year, achieved an initial savings of 73% for the initial 50 courses. In addition, they also achieved a significant time savings as administrators were able to reduce the amount of time that they spent manually creating, assigning, and tracking courses.  Along with unlimited access to the CE Unlimited library and CertPrep courses, they were able to incorporate content that had been created by their clinical leaders.