Continuing Medical Education
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- APS Patient Safety Series
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- APS Obstetrics Courses
- Advanced Fetal Assessment and Monitoring Package
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- APS Surgery Courses
- Surgical Toolkits
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- APS General Practice Courses
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- APS Core Risk Content Courses
Continuing Legal Education
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- Continuing Legal Education in Obstetrics
Download PDF version of APS course catalog
The APS online CME catalog now includes clinical content in multiple areas and over 40 titles that improve practitioner proficiency and reduce hospital errors. Several things make our courses unique:
- Each course is developed with nationally recognized experts from some of the nation’s most respected academic medical centers and medical communities, including the Harvard and Stanford schools of medicine.
- We focus extensively on clinical practice, enabling change that results in increased patient safety and improved outcomes for the
nurse or doctor.
- All courses are created with a highly engaging, self-directed format that employs the most advanced principles of adult learning, stressing case application of skills and knowledge.
- Courses can be accessed through a flexible, web-based interface, enabling clinicians to complete them at their own pace, at any time of day, from any computer.
Our course offerings achieve proven reduction of hospital errors and a rapid return on investment. They enable hospitals to get the best out of their human assets and minimize medical errors. CME with a customized learning path creates strong efficiencies and greater effectiveness. We apply trusted continued medical education based on the individual’s needs profile and goals for reduction of hospital errors.
Continuing Legal Education (CLE) Curriculum
To properly defend a medical malpractice case, it is imperative that the attorney has a thorough knowledge of the subject matter. APS’s online CLE courses enable attorneys to communicate with the experts on the expert’s level and to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the clinical issues at hand.
APS’s CLE courses are derived from APS’s online Continuing Medical Education (CME) library, which contains the same information thousands of nurses and physicians train on across the country. These original CME courses have been augmented by leaders in the legal field to include attorney commentary and real-life case studies to assist attorneys in understanding the importance of the medicine involved in medical malpractice cases. Each course is interactive, learner-centric, and designed to suit the learning styles and busy work environment of legal professionals.
Healthcare Risk Management Education
Primary threats to patient safety today are not always clinical negligence, but
factors such as poor communication, inadequate disclosure, error prone systems,
and inflexible staff hierarchies. Our
healthcare risk management education is a comprehensive curriculum of core
content courses that addresses all of these
areas. It results in immediate
improvements in both patient safety
and staff morale. Healthcare risk management education also examines
the roles and responsibilities of
clinicians in managing patient
expectations, responding to patients,
and working in a team environment.
Communication
- SBAR+R: Structuring Communication in Health Care
- The Risk of Poor Communication
- The Telephone in Clinical Practice
- Informed Consent: A Medicolegal Case Study
Disclosure and Documentation
- The Disclosure of Unanticipated Outcomes
- Reporting Errors: Learning from Experience
- Documentation Makes the Difference
Coordination of Care
- Teamwork in a Labor and Delivery Setting
- Coordination of Patient Care
Risk Management
- Risk Management Basics: Protection and Pitfalls
- Office-Based Risk
- A Physician’s Role in a Medical Malpractice Case
Surgical Safety Curriculum
The APS Surgical Safety Curriculum synthesizes the wisdom of renowned
surgeons and highly experienced nurses. These clinicians recognize that an
estimated 54-74% of surgically related adverse events are preventable. They
have seen firsthand the losses—in patient health, in team morale, in liability and
reputational costs—associated with these events in their organizations. And
they share the dedication of APS to eradicating the flaws in hospital systems and
processes that lead to surgical error and thereby protecting patient safety.
The courses in this curriculum provide practical tips and guidelines to help
surgical teams avoid or quickly respond to technical error, improve team
communication, and reduce claims. The underlying philosophy of the courses
is a collaborative practice model of a single team caring for patients. In this
model, surgical nurses are integral to providing high-quality patient care and
reducing errors.
In partnership with Stanford Hospital & Clinics, the Risk Management Foundation
of the Harvard Medical Institutions, experts from the Harvard medical community,
and the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN), Advanced
Practice Strategies provides the following curriculum:
- Reducing Error in the Operating Room, a course that systematically addresses
how surgical teams can build safeguards against error through
preoperative planning, appropriate intraoperative management, and
postoperative follow-up.
- A series of Surgical Resources focused on specific procedures (Laparoscopic
Cholecystectomy, Inguinal Hernia, Colectomy) as well as on preventable
errors associated with the endoscopic technique and instrumentation
(Laparoscopic Error).
- Bariatric Surgery, a course that covers one of the most rapidly expanding
surgical specialties, given the rapid rise in obesity in the last two
decades.
These courses are interactive, engaging, and designed to fit the work style of
surgeons and their teams. Every course includes opportunities for clinicians to
apply the principles covered to specific cases. In addition, the courses include
commentary from experts in a range of specialties, from risk managers to
surgeons to perioperative nurses. Our goal with the Surgical Safety Curriculum,
as with all of our courses, is to make a difference.
General Practice / Internal Medicine
The APS General Practice and Internal Medicine Curriculum focuses on high risk areas of general medicine. Most notable, safe prescribing practices and environments. The modern pharmacopeia of drugs offers near miraculous benefits to many patients. Chief among the pillars of the development of Western Medicine are clinical pharmacologic achievements. At the same time, the power of these remedies also makes them potentially dangerous. All medications deserve to be handled with extreme caution. To err in the prescribing or administration of drugs is to flirt with disaster.
Similarly, the management of chronic pain patients can be a difficult process as physicians face concerns about addiction and misuse of medications. However, more than 90 million Americans experience chronic pain symptoms and a large number of chronic pain patients suffer from undertreated pain. There are safe screening methods and prescription approaches for treating these patients.
This course series examines some of the more common causes of prescribing errors, which include illegible handwriting, errors in calculation, mistakes in dosing or frequency of administration, look-alike and sound-alike drugs, ambiguous abbreviations and symbols and miscommunication among health professionals. Most of these mistakes are preventable. The courses offer many proven approaches for reducing the harm that often results from them.
In partnership with Stanford Hospital & Clinics, the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions, experts from the Harvard medical community provide the following curriculum:
- Chronic Pain Management: Assessment, Treatment, and Risk Management
- Safe Prescribing Practices
- Safe Prescribing Environments
These courses are interactive, engaging, and designed to fit the work style of
busy physicians. Every course includes opportunities for clinicians to
apply the principles covered to specific cases. In addition, the courses include
commentary from experts in a range of specialties, from risk managers to
physicians. Our goal with the General Practice / Internal Medicine Curriculum,
as with all of our courses, is to make a difference.
Perinatal Safety Curriculum
APS is a leader in obstetrics education. Our Perinatal Safety Curriculum addresses fundamental questions in
the practice of obstetrics: When is intervention necessary? Why do clinical
teams sometimes fail to recognize or respond to worsening trends in a patient’s
clinical profile? And how can we improve obstetrical outcomes by sharpening
decision-making skills, building team collaboration, and encouraging the
adoption of processes that address common system failures?
Adopted as the foundation of obstetrics education by hospitals
and insurers nationwide, the APS curriculum covers:
- Interpretation of electronic fetal heart rate tracings, long an area of confusion
and contradiction. APS obstetrics education applies the 2008 National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) fetal monitoring
recommendations to foster a common language for obstetric caregivers
and implements teaching to standardize tracing interpretation.
- Preventing postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) and, when it occurs, managing
it appropriately. Expert obstetricians estimate that 70-90% of maternal
deaths from PPH are preventable. This course provides extensive tutorials
and practice on blood loss estimation, a common area of failure.
- Managing shoulder dystocia, an emergency involved in at least a quarter of
obstetrics-related claims.
- Performing operative vaginal deliveries, based on indications defined by the
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (the College).
- Competency maintenance, supported through half-hour cases delivered
monthly by subscription.
- SBAR+R, a structured method of communicating complex information in
an organized, respectful, and concise manner.
The broad use of this OBGYN education curriculum reflects the value created by APS partnerships
with organizations dedicated to patient safety. Adoption, however, is only the
first step. The Perinatal Safety Curriculum reduces obstetrical claims and
builds the strengths of collaborative teams by engaging learners and providing
case-based drills, practical tips, and expert commentary. Our courses make a
difference because they fit the work and learning styles of clinicians desiring effective OBGYN education.
Patient Safety Program
Error-prone system structures are the source of a considerable portion of
preventable errors in US hospitals. Authored in partnership with the Risk
Management Foundation of the Harvard Institutions and Dr. Lucian Leape, our
goal is to help clinicians
recognize when these
errors occur, as well as
employ the latest
systems-theory research
to develop strategies for
both preventing and
responding to systems based
errors. APS’ patient safety program includes:
- Errors and Injuries in Health Care helps clinicians characterize adverse events
in health care and understand how the culture of blame within some hospital
systems can block efforts to improve patient safety.
- Using Systems Theory to Understand Errors and Injuries in Health Care gives
clinicians a deeper understanding of the concept of the health care "system"
and instructs as to how systems theory can be applied to health care.
- Using Systems Theory to Prevent Errors and Injuries in Health Care helps
clinicians use human factors and engineering principles, helping them
understand complex systems, to prevent errors and injuries in health care.
- Responding to Adverse Events and Errors in Healthcare illustrates how to
compare and contrast the person and system approaches to human error and
applies human factors principles to the redesign of health care systems.
- Changing Systems focuses on a method called "rapid cycle change," or
PDSA, a simple but effective process of making small changes in systems,
which cumulatively deliver major impact.
APS’ patient safety program is ideal for hospitals desiring superior clinical
behavior that enhances medical outcomes and minimizes medical error.