Continuing Education (CE) Class Catalog

Course Description

This course examines how the models of care, nursing leadership and management style promoted by magnet status designation schemes negatively impact the registered nurse’s ability to exercise independent professional judgment and advocate in the exclusive interest of the patient.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the effects of magnet designation on the art and science of RN practice and the RN duty and right of patient advocacy.
2. Recognize the importance of the direct care RNs autonomy in exercising independent, professional judgment in the exclusive interest of their patients.

Instructors: 

Gerard Brogan, RN, Patricia Gonzalez, RN

Course Details:

This will be a 1-hour online class via Zoom for 1 hour of continuing education credits.

After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.

Course Description

Racism and nursing have been intertwined since the inception of modern nursing. This course will examine the history of how racism has affected Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and how this history has set the stage for the ongoing structural racism that exists today within our health care settings. Nurses will be able to reflect on their own behavior in perpetuating biases and racism and analyze the current recommendations on how to move forward as an anti-racist. This will include recognizing and naming racism and working toward the deconstruction of structural racism based on white supremacy. To be anti-racist is both an idea and a call to action. Racism must be actively sought out and defeated. In turn, building a society based on social justice, equity, and worker solidarity.

Course Objectives

1. Explore the history of racism within the practice of nursing starting in the United Kingdom and then focusing on the United States
2. Describe how structural racism manifested within our health care institutions and recognize the parallels of these inequities between our health care intuitions and society at large.
3. Discover what it means to be anti-racist and how to fight structural racism through transforming both themselves and their communities

Instructor: Rochelle Pardue Okimoto, RN

Course Details:

This will be a 2-hour online class via Zoom for 2 hours of continuing education credits.

After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to spread unabated around the world due to a near complete abandonment of public health measures and dissembling about the ongoing pandemic. Repeated surges in Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths put nurses and other health care workers at heightened and perpetual risk for infection and moral injury. As more individuals are continually exposed to and infected by SARS-CoV-2, reports of long-term health consequences have also increased (long Covid). This CE class will discuss the latest scientific updates about long Covid and the implications of these scientific updates for nurses, their patients, and advocacy for safe patient care.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this class, participants should be able to:​

• Describe major updates in scientific knowledge regarding long Covid
• Discuss the implications of long Covid for nurses, their patients, and advocacy for safe patient care

Instructor: Rocelyn de Leon-Minch and/or Jane Thomason

Course Details:

This will be a 2-hour online class via Zoom for 2 hours of continuing education credits.

After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.

The hospital industry’s constant drive to cut costs poses a major threat to the continuity of care nurses provide for patients. Nowhere has this threat been more alarming than in recent attempts to splinter the nursing profession into an on-demand workforce. Promising flexibility and independence, tech startups and legislative proposals that aim to “gigify” nursing in fact gut the workplace protections that enable RNs to be effective patient advocates. This course will engage nurses in a discussion of the increasing predominance of so-called gig work in health care and provide the tools necessary to resist the dismantling of their profession.

Objectives:

• Explain why employment protections are fundamental to nurses’ ability to provide safe and effective care.
• Describe the historical precedents behind worker misclassification and how this perpetuates inequities in the health care workforce.
• Enumerate long-term measures that can be taken to address the RN staffing crisis while preserving the integrity of the profession.

Instructors: KB Burnside-Oxendine

Course Details:

This will be a 2-hour online class via Zoom for 2 hours of continuing education credits. After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.

This class will examine the connections between recent attacks on LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights and explore the broader political and economic context of restrictions on life-saving health care for women and gender oppressed people. We will connect the current assault on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy to the history of reproductive control and gender oppression in the U.S., paying particular attention to the complicit role medicine and health care providers have played in that history. The course will review the overwhelming evidence that reproductive and gender affirming health care is life-saving care, and we will consider the reproductive, gender, and racial health disparities that make the fight for health care justice integral to gender and racial justice. Finally, we will discuss why resisting these attacks is essential to advancing the wider movements to protect democracy and advance health and economic justice.

Objectives:

• Understand the connections between reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and gender self-determination
• Explore the history of reproductive control and gender oppression in the U.S.
• Articulate the evidence that reproductive care and gender affirming care is safe and vital health care
• Identify the role health care access has in advancing social and economic justice

Instructors: Kel Montalvo-Quiñones

Course Details:

This will be a 3-hour online class via Zoom for 3 hours of continuing education credits. After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.

This course will analyze impact of “financialization” in the hospital industry, which refers both to the growing influence of outside investors and to hospitals prioritizing their own investments over patient care. We will examine the consequences of financialization for patients, nurses, and communities, including surprise billing practices, inflated executive pay, hospital closures, and the skyrocketing cost of care.

Financialization has come at the expense of patient care and safe working environments for nurses. This course will consider how financialization left hospitals woefully unprepared for the pandemic; how the industry has exploited the crisis to pursue more financialization; and how their actions have contributed to worsening gender and racial health disparities. We will conclude by looking at how nurses are using their collective power to fight back against this financialization of the hospital industry and for patient-centered care at the bedside and beyond.

Objectives:

• Understand the political and economic forces driving financialization in the hospital industry.
• Identify specific examples of financialization in health care and describe the detrimental impacts on patients and nurses.
• Explore how nurses can fight to protect their patients from these trends

Instructors: Omid Mohamadi

Course Details:

This will be a 2-hour online class via Zoom for 2 hours of continuing education credits. After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.

Course Description

This class will describe how the Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the stress inherent in the registered nurse’s role within the current for-profit healthcare system.

The class will explore the critical stressors, both acute and chronic, facing the profession and offer solutions to mitigate those stressors.

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this class, participants should be able to:​

• Explain the causes of Moral Distress and Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD)
• Describe methods to mitigate Moral Distress and PTSD

Instructor: Gerard Brogan, RN, Patricia Gonzalez, RN

Course Details:

This will be a 2-hour online class via Zoom for 2 hours of continuing education credits.

After registering, you will receive an invitation to the Zoom class via email. It is important that you respond to the invitation and register for the Zoom class prior to the day of the class.

CE courses are free to National Nurses United members. Classes are only offered to direct-care and staff RNs.