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.

Rural Mental Healthcare Provision

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education has a series of grand round webinars on mental health issues for rural and frontier healthcare providers. CEUs & CMEs are available 1 year from the time of the original offerings, so all of these have CEs in place through at least November, ’09 (and 3 of the 4 well into Spring 2010). Access is free of charge; all are approximately 90 minutes long.

Suicidal Behavior in Adolescents

Medscape has a new CE offering: Suicidal Behavior in Adolescents–Risk Factor Identification, Screening & Prevention. 0.25 CEs are available for both physicians and nurses. Access is free, but registration is required on the site. As with all of their offerings, it’s in a standard article-posttest format; there is also a pretest (2 questions) that must be completed prior to reading the article.

PTSD and Suicide

New from Medscape, a CE offering based on an article from the March 2009 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Heightens Suicide Risk provides .25 AMA PRA Category 1 credits for physicians, free of charge. It doesn’t look like there are nursing CEs attached to this one, though.

Weekend Extra: Workplace Violence

This weekend has been yet another sad reminder of the epidemic of workplace violence. It’s obviously not a new phenomenon, but right now it seems to be happening with frightening frequency. The US Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) actually has a tool for hospitals (cleverly known as the Hospital eTool) that addresses a wide variety of hazards in the workplace, such as blood-borne pathogens and medical lasers(!). There’s also a section on workplace violence.

Youth Violence Prevention

This week is Youth Violence Prevention Week and NCJRS has a site dedicated to the topic. By clicking on the right hand column of the main page, you can access fully-linked separate pages on stats; gun violence; youth violence; research; school violence; and gangs. Most of the links lead to federal sites (most of those within DOJ/NIJ), so it’s not definitive, but it’s pretty extensive.

Injury Research

From VAWNet: The CDC has released their Injury Research Agenda for 2009-2018. You can see the full report here (PDF).

Firearms

The University of Utah Eccles Health Science Library has an online firearms tutorial available here. It’s easy to use and has almost no bells and whistles (but it has photos!) so you should be able to view this on any computer. I’m not sure when the course was last updated (some of the statistics look old), but the mechanics of firearms and the appearance of gunshot wounds haven’t really changed, so age shouldn’t be a significant issue. It was created for pathologists, meaning it has a medical, rather than law enforcement, flavor.