From diabetes to snake bites to adolescent mental health issues, the UNMC Center for Continuing Education is serving constituents here and abroad.
During the past year, the center provided more than 12,400 hours of continuing education credit — the equivalent of 516 days — to more than 21,700 health care professionals in Nebraska and throughout the world.
“Our office is here to make our academic and clinical programs shine,” said Lois Colburn, executive director of UNMC’s Center for Continuing Education for the past year.
“As an accredited provider, our role is to ensure that continuing education programs for health professionals are unbiased and evidence-based,” Colburn said.
That commitment will continue, she said, in accordance with a national movement among continuing medical education (CME) providers to link CME’s to quality healthcare. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) recently developed a new set of Standards for Commercial Support, due to increased scrutiny of pharmaceutical companies in marketing and their role in CME.
The new standards, which were adopted in September 2004 and enacted this past May, require CME providers to continue to take responsibility for all aspects of the planning and implementation of their CME activities including making decisions about content, faculty and management of funds. In addition, they now require providers to have a mechanism in place to identify and resolve conflicts of interests in CME.
Speakers, as well as members of planning committees, must sign conflict of interest statements early in the process, Colburn said. “Groups can no longer come to us with a final program and expect accreditation,” she said. “We need to look at being partners in the planning process from the beginning. While we do not anticipate denying CME approval, there may be occasions when someone on the planning committee or someone selected as a speaker might need to modify their role due to a conflict of interest.”
ACCME also requires that, for the sake and safety of patients, the continuing medical education in which physicians participate must be based on valid content. According to the ACCME, providers are not eligible to receive or maintain ACCME accreditation if they present activities that promote treatments that are known to have risks or dangers that outweigh the benefits or are known to be ineffective in the treatment of patients.
“The higher standards respond to the needs of our health care system,” said Colburn, who formerly served as assistant vice president in the Division of Community and Minority Programs at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. “The standards also raise our accountability to patients and physicians. They are essentially about maintaining the public trust.”
The new standards will become part of the national accreditation process, Colburn said, noting that UNMC’s Center for Continuing Education will go through its reaccreditation process this fall.
During the process of preparing for reaccreditation, the 16-person continuing education staff will maintain business as usual – hosting a number of annual conferences ranging from the internationally renown Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference in Koloa Kauai, Hawaii, to the rural emergency medicine workshop at UNMC.
During the past year, the Center for Continuing Education has taken a more active role in community service to the university, supporting such endeavors as the Music as Medicine series. It also is working with geriatric medicine to accredit its new HRSA-funded fellowship program and is active in Nebraska’s emerging teleheath network.
“We’re building relationships,” Colburn said. “Individuals and departments are beginning to see us as a true partner,” which only strengthens her goal “to be a premiere service unit that highlights the educational units at UNMC.”
In the near future, the center will be acquiring dedicated space in Poynter Hall for its regular emergency medical services offerings. The amphitheater and several labs will be refurbished to enhance skills training in its advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), pediatric advanced life support (PALS) and basic life support courses (BLS). “We look forward to providing course participants with a learning environment as close to the clinical and field setting as possible,” said Leslie Gunning, program associate in the Center for Continuing Education.
Meanwhile, three employees in UNMC’s Center for Continuing Education — Brenda Ram, Joan Husted and Diane Frost — have achieved the Convention Industry Council’s Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) designation, which is the foremost certification program of today’s meetings, conventions and exhibitions industry.
The CMP designation recognizes those who have achieved the industry’s highest standard of professionalism. The requirements for certification are based on professional experience and an academic examination. Ram joined UNMC in 1983 and received her CMP in 2000. Husted, who joined in 2001, and Frost, who joined in 2000, each received their CMP in 2005.
The center also is:
Working with the Center for Biopreparedness Education on train-the-trainer courses for basic and advanced disaster life support, as well as working on honing skills for disaster events. The two centers are in the process of becoming a regional training center for the Midwest.
- Collaborating with the School of Allied Health Professions on distance education programs and developing continuing education programs for perfusionists.
- Seeking such creative programming as “snakebites in the new millennium,” which will be offered on campus Oct. 21-23.
- Collaborating with the Association of Academic Health Centers to accredit their CME outreach programs for community providers on such topics as HIV, diabetes and minority populations.
Colburn is steadfast in making UNMC’s Center for Continuing Education a resource for the state. “When people think of improving the health of Nebraskans, we want them to think of continuing education as a part of that,” she said.
For more information on identifying and resolving conflicts of interest visit the ACCME Web site at www.accme.org/.