Weekly Wrap-Up @ the Sustainability Blog

This week was a good one at the Sustainability site. We’re back with a new Coordinator Q&A, and a couple additional goodies for all you program managers out there:

• A brief post on getting your needs met, something we all could learn to manage a bit better, I think
• A cross-post that was unbelievably popular on this site: Jen Pierce-Weeks’ guest post on evaluating SANE trainers (seriously–the traffic on this was incredible)
• The Friday Q&A with Traci Jones from Cheyenne, WY. Thanks, Traci!

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

New Online Courses at IAFN

Two new online courses have been announced at IAFN: SANE Dialogues: Focus Group on the Use of nPEP in SANE Programs and Patterns of Injury in Non-Accidental Childhood Fatalities. They’re free for members; non-members pay $10 each. It would appear that there are CEUs attached, but I could not find any specifics related to how many for either course. If you’re a Firefox user, be forewarned: you may not be able to complete the posttest to get credit for the course, so Internet Explorer is really the only way to access this content (which frankly sucks for Mac users like me).

Cultural Competency & Disaster Response

The Department of Health & Human Services’ Office of Minority Health has a new curriculum available: Cultural Competency for Disaster Preparedness & Crisis Response. The curriculum consists of 4 courses that “are designed to equip disaster and crisis volunteers and personnel with the awareness, knowledge, and skills needed to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services to diverse communities during all phases of disaster. The curriculum is grounded in the Office of Minority Health’s CLAS Standards, which are grouped into three themes: Culturally Competent Care, Language Access Services, and Organizational Supports.”

Evidence-Based Medicine, Pt. II

Time once again for another installment of evidence-based medicine. The issue gets brought up in emails to me from time to time, and recently I’ve had a spate of them. So here’s another tutorial for your learning pleasure– this time, from the University of North Carolina and Duke University.

I think this issue is an important one, because as I’ve expressed many a time, one of the most critical questions you should be able to answer as a clinician is “Why?”. “Because that’s the way I was taught” or “That’s how we’ve always done it” probably isn’t going to cut it.

Guest Post: Evaluating SANE Trainers

I’m pleased to welcome Jennifer Pierce Weeks to Forensic Healthcare Online. As a clinician, administrator, national trainer and President of IAFN, she is another one of those folks who spends a lot of time talking with people in the field, and has a great perspective on healthcare-focused, patient-centered, sustainable programming.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about the issue of quality in SANE/SAFE education. There are no mandated qualifications for who provides the education, so caveat emptor is the rule of the day. IAFN does not police training, but provides education guidelines that describe the minimum body of knowledge all SANEs/SAFEs should possess (there are also training standards for sexual assault forensic examiners (PDF) around the National Protocol). Needless to say, some of the education out there is definitely better than others.

My New Gig

So about that announcement of mine…

I have been teaching and consulting for prosecutors for many years now. It’s really one of the parts of my professional life I enjoy most. So I am beyond grateful to be able to announce that today is the 1st day of my new job, as medical advisor for a brand new prosecution institute: Aequitas, the Prosecutor’s Resource on Violence Against Women. Our new website is just about ready to launch (we’re only about a month old, now); for a few more days you may still get the “under construction” notice. I will continue to oversee the National SANE Sustainability Technical Assistance project, as well–essentially splitting my time between those two gigs. You can check the updated About for all the details.

Articles of Note: July Edition

Time once again for a run down of some of the new and noteworthy articles in the current literature. Most of these are from the June/July/August issues. As always, please keep in mind this in no way a comprehensive list; simply items that have caught my attention from a selection of peer-reviewed journals. Most links lead to PubMed abstracts (except for one, which goes to Ingenta); from there you can choose what’s worth a.) paying for; b.) a pilgrimage to your nearest medical library;  or c.) downloading via the full-text access you possibly have at your disposal.

Just a warning: it’s a lengthy list this month. There’s all kinds of good stuff being published right now…

Weekly Wrap-Up @ the Sustainability Blog

I’m back from the desert and looking forward to a long weekend. I’m going to take part of the day off, so just an abbreviated warp-up (wow, now that’s a typo!) wrap-up today. Because I was gone all week, only a couple things on the sustainability site:

• A fascinating article about the current freefall of the Memphis SANE program–heartbreaking when you run a national sustainability project
• A beginner’s guide to online marketing and fundraising webinar announcement

Have a safe and happy 4th for all of my American readers (and for my Canadian readers, a belated happy Canada Day!). I’ll be back Monday with new content, the July edition of Articles of Note, and a big announcement!

Workplace Violence: The Nurse Victim

ANA has a recently updated CE offering on nurse victims of workplace violence. It’s your standard article-posttest format. Cost is $20 ($15 for ANA members) for 1.52 CEUs. The focus of this course is a bit different than what you might initially think–there’s more of a secondary trauma bent following victimization (rather than a lateral violence focus, as is often the case with a lot of these offerings).

STD Clinical Intensive

Because the topic is so popular on this site, another online STD clinical course, this one from Boston University’s School of Medicine. It’s free of charge, but requires registration to participate. CMEs available (natch), but the course info specifies nurses as part of the target audience, as well. For those of you running sexual assault programs, this might be a good one to have your team members complete as a part of annual competency efforts–just have them print off the certificate of completion at the end (or whatever they provide for CMEs), and you can add it to their personnel files.

I haven’t done this one yet, so I’ll be interested in feedback…

Pediatric Burns

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta has a streaming Grand Rounds webcast available: Burns in Pediatrics–Abuse, Accident or Outlier? It’s available free of charge, but requires registration with the site. Unfortunately, this one is also CMEs only, but is certainly relevant for clinicians across the board. (I’m working on finding some new relevant nursing CEs, but there are a lot less of those, sorry.)

Suicide in the Elderly

Medscape has a short CME offering on suicide in the geriatric population: Sedatives & Hypnotics May Increase Risk for Suicide in Elderly Patients. 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™ available (Family Physicians – maximum of 0.25 AAFP Prescribed credit(s)). This is a standard article-posttest format, based on a study published this month in BMC Geriatrics.

Caring for Pediatric/Adolescent LGBT Patients

The Children’s Hospital of Denver has an archived grand rounds presentation on caring for LGBT patients and their families in pediatric and adolescent medicine that was initially presented last November. It’s a 40 minute video with Powerpoint slides, and I particularly like that it’s focused on peds, since that subset of this specialized patient population is even less well represented in the online continuing education offerings.

Sadly, they don’t provide CEs for video archives, so no love there.

Weekly Wrap-Up @ the Sustainability Blog

Next week I will be traveling to the surface of the sun Bakersfield, CA and will be gone most of the week, so posts may be a bit lighter, depending on how my time ends up being use while I’m there. But that’s next week. This week, over at the sustainability site:

• A little business inspiration (that has already traveled far and wide across the web, but applies, nonetheless)
• A great overview of free software available to small businesses from a somewhat unlikely source
• A paper from the archives of the Alliance on Nonprofit Management on business plans vs. strategic plans
• And for your (wonky) reading pleasure, Andy Goodman’s 10th annual Summer Reading List

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Disaster Mental Health

I have had what could be benignly called a very long travel day (involving groundstops, flying through thunderstorms, airport power outages, and the like). It’s far later than I planned to be posting for today (actually yesterday now), so this is a short and simple one for those of you interested in traumatic stress and emotional trauma: from David Baldwin’s Trauma Information Pages, his comprehensive listing of online disaster mental health resources. I don’t normally just highlight a page of links as the sole content for a post, but this one is so exhaustive, I figured it’s a great resource to add to the arsenal.