Why Enhancing Clinical Education Is Critical for CE Directors

Clinical education is vastly important and shouldn’t be overlooked. The more equipped that medical staff such as nurses and support staff are, the more efficiently they can provide solutions and help patients.

Continuing Education (CE) is a great tool to help employees learn as they work, while also being able to attend conferences and self-training modules and gain access to advanced degree courses. Learning online, or “eLearning,” is a cost-effective way to raise the standards of your health professionals to provide a stronger workforce.

Ensuring that clinical education is relevant and beneficial to healthcare professionals is essential. Furthermore, you should consistently enhance clinical training modules and programs to provide more rewarding and engaging levels of education.

Let’s go over why clinical education should be enhanced and the benefits it provides.

The benefits of enhanced clinical education

Enhancing the clinical learning experience can help keep medical personnel up to date with the latest medicinal and technological advancements. The benefits of this include shorter patient stays in hospitals and a greater ability to manage chronic diseases.

Other advantages of enhanced clinical education:

• Quality of Learning. Raising the standard of the staff’s ability comes down to the quality of learning and teaching that they’ve been given with clinical education.
• Preparation. Staff are more prepared for unpredictable and spontaneous events. Enhanced education can provide sufficient clinical cases in different areas for medical personnel to learn from and adapt to the workplace. For example, enhanced training with viral outbreaks like Covid-19 would equip and prepare staff with the necessary tools to tackle the situation.
• Improved Culture. Eighty-seven percent of millennials find professional development to be a defining factor in a job. Creating a supportive learning environment to help clinical personnel improves the overall culture of the clinic to boost morale and signify to employees that they’re valued and have growth opportunities.
• Increased Productivity. Higher quality of staff performance, improved job satisfaction, and employee engagement all help increase productivity, workflow, and problem-solving capabilities within the clinical workplace.

How to enhance medical clinical education

Enhancing medical clinical education CE programs can be done in several ways to benefit healthcare learners. The most important aspect is to tailor content to specific learners and fields of study. This can be achieved offline and online, depending on what’s easier for medical staff and more cost-effective for organizations.

A few ways to make clinical education more efficient are:

• Attendance Tracking. For CE programs that require a minimum number of hours as mandatory, automated attendance tracking with metrics can track which learners are present online and offline. Attendance can also be tracked and recorded via smartphones to be applied to the learner’s overall credits.
• Simulation-Based Education. This can supplement the knowledge and skills used during real-life events. For example, clinical situations can be mirrored to develop the learner’s skills with real-time feedback.
• Web-Based Simulations. These can be used to create interactive scenarios that allow HCPs to diagnose cases based on a series of medical, therapeutic, and patient safety decisions.

Measuring the efficiency of clinical education can be as simple as assessing student scores and rewarding them with credits for programs and curriculums. Faculty should also be evaluated for teaching skills and professionalism to make sure that learners are being taught skills and not just repeating facts to pass the programs.

Why enhancing clinical education is critical

There’s a distinct need to enhance the education for the workers in medical practices. Improving the standard of care given to patients is a primary goal and can help achieve higher rates of productivity, smoother workflow, more efficient processes within the work environment, and greater return on investment.

Why directors should consider enhancing clinical education:

• Medical students often find it challenging to apply what they have learned in classrooms to the clinical workplace. Enhanced clinical education helps bridge the gap by providing more experience to teachers and personnel for greater adaptability to the clinical workplace.
• Put patients first to improve their healthcare. According to research, 88% of the surveyed companies use Learning Management Systems to improve the user experience. Enhancing clinical education is critical to ensure that patient care is of the highest standard, and healthcare personnel is equipped to assess, diagnose, and care for patients, with little room for error.
• HCPs can study a specific area of intervention to enhance their practice in a field of clinical education.
• Enhancing clinical education is a great way to nurture the teachers who teach. For example, doctors who work in teaching hospitals can have access to the latest information, skills, and processes. Nurturing teachers is a great way to keep them motivated and at the top of their game.

EthosCE believes CME technology solutions should be designed to improve healthcare professionals’ user experience, comply with ACCME guidelines, reduce administrative costs, and demonstrate measurable outcomes.

To learn how EthosCE can enhance the continuing education of your medical professionals, request a free 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today!