Continuing Education (CE) Class Catalog

New technologies are being deployed in health care at an ever-increasing pace and with little transparency or accountability. This course will discuss the crucial role of nurses in determining how and whether such technology should be employed in the care of their patients. We will analyze how algorithms and related technologies have perpetuated systemic mistreatment of marginalized patients, especially when designed by non-clinicians guided by the goals of profit and efficiency. And we will detail how nurses are fighting to ensure that all communities receive the safe and equitable treatment they deserve.  

Objectives:

• Explain how purportedly neutral health care technologies can encode biases and perpetuate health disparities
• Articulate why effective patient advocacy entails safeguarding RNs’ clinical judgment, including the right to override health information technology
• Describe the limitations of technical fixes to health care, and explain why systemic changes are needed to ensure that technology can produce equitable health outcomes

Instructor: 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.

This is the first of two classes focusing on public health. This first class will explore the history of the public health movement, featuring exemplary individuals who brought insights, energy and leadership to the long struggle to enact public health policies.​ The course will focus on nurses as guardians of the public’s health, through inspiring examples of nurse-led social programs and community initiatives, and the significant contribution the nursing profession has made to the progress of public health.​

The second class will be presented in the fall and will focus on the present and the challenges and opportunities to improve public health starkly illustrated by the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic.

Course Objectives

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

1. Understand historic challenges to enacting robust public health measures and systems.​ ​
2. Describe Nurses historic and current role in promoting public health.​ ​
3. Identify how knowledge of past nurse led public health initiatives can inform present day nurses on how to effectively advocate for and lead equitable comprehensive, public health systems.

Instructors: Gerard Brogan, RN, Patricia Gonzalez, RN, Rochelle Pardue-Okimoto, RN

Course Details

This will be a 3-hour online class via Zoom for 3 hour of continuing education credits.

After registering at the link below, 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.

This course will examine the unmet health needs and unique health care disparities faced by LGBTQI+ people in the US. Rather than approach gender and sexuality as innate facts, we will trace the history of these categories and analyze the ways in which they regulate people’s access and proximity to the resources, institutions, and material means of sustaining life. Accordingly, we will look at how cultural stigma, institutional discrimination, interpersonal and state violence, clinical pathologization, and legal attacks on civil rights converge to create the conditions of ill-health for queer and trans patients. We will also look to historical and contemporary examples of queer and trans resistance and resiliency in the face of gender and sexual oppression.

Within this context, the course reviews ongoing struggles for LGBTQI+ health justice and reveals nurses’ vital contributions to ensuring equitable care for LGBTQI+ patients. As patient advocates, nurses have a unique role in resisting institutional discrimination, fighting for social justice, and providing care that recognizes everyone’s self-determination, bodily autonomy, and right to health.

Objectives

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

1. Identify the health and health care disparities faced by LGBTQI+ people and their root social, economic, political, and historical causes.
2. Analyze gender and sexuality as social determinants of health.
3. Describe the unique role of nurses in providing equitable care and resisting institutional discrimination.

Instructor: Kel Montalvo-Quinones

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.

In recent decades, hospitals have increasingly taken their lead from manufacturing models designed to increase efficiency and impose standardization on their workforces. This course will examine how hospitals’ adoption of profit-driven tactics such as lean production, just-in-time inventories, and global supply chains has led to over-stressed and unsafe workplaces, amplifying the Covid-19 crisis and jeopardizing the well-being of nurses and patients alike. Crucially, we will discuss measures nurses have taken and can continue to take to fight back against these harmful trends and advocate for a health system that prioritizes preparedness and public health.

Objectives

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

1. Chart a timeline describing hospitals’ integration of just-in-time management strategies into the healthcare setting.
2. Link the hospital industry’s historical cost-cutting practices to current staffing and supply crises.
3. Explain how collective action and public advocacy can help create safeguards around patient care and safer healthcare workplaces.

Instructor: KB Burnside-Oxendine

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.

This course will provide a brief history of how American hospitals went from local charitable and public institutions focused on patient and community need to the vast, profit-driven industry they comprise today. We will consider how various social, political, and economic developments—including major reforms like the introduction of Medicare and the ACA, the increasing privatization and corporatization of health care, and the workplace and public advocacy of nurses and other patient advocates—have shaped the industry. We will examine the consequences of this history for nurses, patients, and communities in the present, including how common industry practices left us uniquely vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Objectives

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

1. Discuss the role of public policy and funding in the hospital industry.
2. Identify how hospital industry business practices have impacted marginalized patients and communities.
3. Explain how nurses have shaped the industry in the past and can continue to advocate for hospitals that are more equitable and responsive to community needs.

Instructor: 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.

From hospitals to health insurance to pharmaceuticals, today’s health care industries are increasingly dominated by monopolies. This class will explore the causes and effects of corporate consolidation and market concentration; how monopoly power in health care and other parts of the economy threatens the health and wellbeing of nurses, patients, and our communities; and what nurses can do to fight the monopoly epidemic.

Objectives: Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:

• Identify the drivers of increasing monopolization in health care
• Describe the health and socioeconomic impacts of this trend
• Explain how to address the monopoly epidemic through collective action, regulation, and comprehensive health care reform like Medicare for All.

Instructor: Chris Nielsen

Course Details

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

After registering at the link below, 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.

This class will investigate the dual epidemics of workplace violence and burnout and what they mean for nurses today, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic that has exposed the long-standing failures of the health care industry to protect the health and safety of nurses and their patients. Using national and state level data and peer-reviewed literature and drawing on participants’ direct experiences, we will examine the relationship between health care industry restructuring of nurses’ work and risk factors for workplace violence and nurse burnout. Understanding this relationship reveals powerful structural solutions to workplace violence, stress, and burnout for nurses.

Objectives: upon completion of this class, participants will be able to:

• Describe root causes for workplace violence, stress, and burnout experienced by nurses
• Identify strategies that aim to restructure nurses’ work
• Discuss steps nurses can take to advocate for safer patient care.

Instructors: Patricia Gonzalez, RN, Rocelyn De Leon-Minch, Jane Thomason

3 hours for 3 CE credits