APS eLearning: Course Offerings
APS Courseware
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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 Content Courses
- Coordination of Patient Care
- Documentation Makes the Difference
- Informed Consent: A Medicolegal Case Study
- Managing a Medical Malpractice Case
- Office-Based Risk
- Reporting Errors: Learning from Experience
- Resident Supervision
- Risk Management Basics: Protection and Pitfalls
- SBAR+R: Structuring Communication in Health Care
- Teamwork in a Labor and Delivery Setting
- The Disclosure of Unanticipated Outcomes
- The Risk of Poor Communications
- The Telephone in Clinical Practice
- APS Core Content Courses
The APS online catalog now includes clinical content in multiple areas and over 40 titles. 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 safety for the patient and 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.
Risk Management/Core Content Curriculum
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 comprehensive curriculum of core content courses addresses all of these areas, resulting in immediate improvements in both patient safety and staff morale. They also examine 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 workstyle 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 workstyle 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
The APS 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 obstetrical continuing 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 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 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.
Patient Safety Series
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.
- 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.
News and Events
Events
APS representatives will be attending the following upcoming events:
- Sept. 25-29, 2010: Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses 2010 Annual Convention (AWHONN)
- Oct. 13-16, 2010: American Society for Healthcare Risk Management 2010 Annual Conference & Exhibition (ASHRM)
News
APS Launches Texas Perinatal Safety Initiative
APS Launches Florida Perinatal Safety Initiative
APS Launches North Carolina and South Carolina Perinatal Safety Initiative
MDAdvantage supports APS’s NJ Perinatal Safety Initiative
AORN and APS Announce a National Surgical Safety Partnership
APS Expands Online Patient Safety Offerings with Resident Supervision Course
APS Launches New Online Course Targeted at Managing Postpartum Hemorrhage