CE Classes & Workshops

Workplace stress is a serious concern for nurses, with impactful consequences for individual nurses’ health as well as patient care, burnout, and turnover. Usually stress is talked about as an individual problem. Solutions proffered by employers generally focus on self-care and stress relief, “I have to make the situation work”, and individual therapy/mental health treatment, “There must be something wrong with me”.

Registered nurses are responsible for and accountable to practicing safely, competently, ethically, and compassionately in accordance with their scope of practice. This class will look at how workplace stress can be a barrier to that responsibility. We will look closely at the fundamental sources of physical, mental, and moral stress in nursing — including understaffing and under-resourcing, amongst others. In looking at the bigger picture of workplace stress, we will identify effective solutions to nurses’ workplace stress.

Course Objectives : 

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

• Articulate root causes of nurses’ work-related stress.
• Describe how a stressful workplace affects patient outcomes.
• Discuss the relation between stress and organizational constraints.

As a nurse, maybe you work in the same community in which you were born and raised. Or, maybe you’ve traveled to your current facility from another neighborhood, another state, or another region of the world. In all these cases, nurses reflect the communities they care for. As patient populations become increasingly diverse, nurses combine on-the-ground community knowledge with the global perspective that’s needed to care for their patients.

This course will examine the role of RNs as global citizens. We will investigate how the nursing profession responds to an international “crisis of care” by pitting the values advocacy and compassion against the exploitative systems their patients face every day. From a historical standpoint, we will explore the ethical challenges and solutions that nurses have faced since the inception of the profession. We will also draw more modern comparisons between RNs and other global caring professions in order to understand how nurses are part of a broader struggle for care, health equity, and justice.

Course Objectives:

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

• Identify how global migration patterns shape patient and caregiver communities.
• Explain how the nursing profession responds to the needs of a global crisis in care.
• Enumerate the social and economic conditions faced by over 19 million nurses across the globe.
• Articulate why the public holds trust and faith in nurses and how nurse ethics can continue to foster confidence in the profession.
• Describe the connections between RNs and other care professionals who form a global movement for care justice.

COURSE TIME:

All class times 9:00 am – 4:00 pm, additional hour available.

A Medicare for All Leadership Development Workshop (4 Contact Hours)

Workshop Times: 9am to 4pm

Nurses are on the frontlines of our acute healthcare crisis. They see the impact of our current healthcare system—driven by the private insurance industry, for-profit hospital systems, and big pharma—on their patients every single day. Because nurses work directly with human beings when they are in their most vulnerable, least dignified of states, nurses have a special vantage point into how to fix our broken healthcare system. This workshop develops, deepens, and broadens this vantage point by preparing nurses to (1) connect their experience at the bedside to the dire need for a more humane healthcare system based on the needs of their patients and not on private pain and profit; and (2) expand their patient advocacy beyond the bedside and into the public sphere.

This workshop consists of two parts:

Part I (for CEHs)

In the first part of this workshop, nurses will be introduced to basic tips and tactics for having challenging conversations about health care policy with their neighbors, communities, and in the media. Our emphasis will be on why nurses support the adoption of Medicare for All as a fundamental expression of their patient and community advocacy. Through participatory exercises, nurses will learn easy, practical, and effective ways to respond to difficult questions asked of them concerning Medicare for All: What is it, and is it the same thing as single payer? Why do we need it? How will it impact nurses? How will we pay for it, and will it really save us money? What will happen to my employer-based health insurance?

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

1. Clearly connect the RN bedside experience to Medicare for All.
2. Respond effectively to the most commonly asked questions about Medicare for All.
3. Employ specific techniques to interview successfully about Medicare for All on television and radio news as well as in print media.

Part II:

During the second part of this workshop, nurses will engage in interactive training exercises to learn specific techniques and strategies for successfully advocating about Medicare for All to their Members of Congress and other legislators.

Upon completion of this program, participants will be able to:  Conduct successful meetings with Members of Congress and their staff, to provide relevant information on Medicare for All policy and support for a single payer system.

American health care is in crisis, and nurses are on the frontlines. Skyrocketing costs are causing nurses’ patients to get sicker as they delay or forgo necessary care. RNs witness growing frustration and despair in their communities as medical debt undermines economic security and hospital closures exacerbate public health disparities. And on top of it all, nurses are forced to deal with constant health and safety risks and increasingly stressful workplaces as they struggle to provide the highest quality care for their patients and advocate for their communities.

Nurses know that at the root of this crisis is a health care system that puts profits over people. But why does America have the system it has, when virtually every other wealthy nation manages to guarantee health care as a right — and at a fraction of the cost? Why do industry leaders and politicians continue to engage in endless policy debates when a majority of the public already agrees that Medicare for All is the obvious solution to our healthcare crisis? How can nurses help achieve Medicare for All so that America can join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteeing health care as a right for all people? What else will RNs have to do, beyond winning Medicare for All, in order to bring about real health justice in the United States? This class will provide answers to these questions and will equip nurses with the basic tools they need to put this knowledge into action for the good of their patients, their profession, and their communities.

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

1. Draw on a wide range of up-to-date research and international comparisons to accurately diagnose the underlying causes of the current health care crisis.
2. Describe how a Medicare for All (single-payer) system works, and explain how it will lower health care costs, improve patient outcomes and public health, and safeguard the nursing profession.
3. Assess how Medicare for All compares to other health care reform proposals on ethical, clinical, professional, and socioeconomic grounds.
4. Articulate which problems Medicare for All will solve and what challenges will remain under a single-payer system.
5. Explain how nurses can work with patients, other clinicians and caregivers, and their communities to achieve health justice through Medicare for All and more.

Part I — Hospital Economics For Nurses: Behind The Scenes of The Business of Health Care

This class investigates the basic economic structures of hospital operations in the United States, focusing on demystifying how executives use the language of economics to justify their decisions. The class also addresses how market-driven medicine encourages nurses to prioritize economic choices over clinical judgment and the moral distress it creates.

Upon completion of Part I of this class, participants will be able to:

1. Compare and contrast the basic economic structure of private, for-profit, non-profit, publicly-traded, and publicly owned hospitals.
2. Recognize how market pressures outside influence budget decisions inside the hospital industry.
3. Identify the downstream health and social consequences of the financial choices hospital executives make.
4. Explain the basic economic and moral investments of different kinds of health care systems.

Part II — The Science of Joy and Solidarity

This class examines the immediate and long-term health, social, and economic benefits of organized collective action. It explores a growing scientific consensus that common purpose and solidarity lead to a collective joy that is a significant and necessary variable in healing the broader challenges we currently face

Upon completion of Part II of this class, participants will be able to:

1. Describe empirically-verified health benefits and multiplier effects of collective joy for individuals, institutions, and communities.
2. Identify organizational structures and practices that support and sustain joyful solidarity.
3. Discuss the immediate and long-term results of joyful patient and collective advocacy.