Rehabilitation Ceus

Stroke is one of leading causes of death and significant disability worldwide. Therefore, health care professionals should possess an understand of how to effectively manage stroke patients. This CEU reviews newly identified stroke risk factors in orde...

The importance of consistent and complete medical documentation in the medical record cannot be overemphasized. Without such documentation, accurate coding cannot be achieved. This CE course provides medical coding guidelines ...

The guideline is relevant to all healthcare professionals providing or directing treatment services to patients recovering from a stroke, in any healthcare setting (primary care, specialty care, and long-term care) and in community pr...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of disability worldwide. It is caused by a bump or blow to the head that affects how the brain normally works (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 2008). Because nurses ar...

Stroke is one of leading causes of death and significant disability worldwide. Therefore, health care professionals should possess an understand of how to effectively manage stroke patients. This CEU reviews newly identified stroke risk factors in orde...

Ethical decision-making in healthcare occurs on a regular basis, often without so much as a passing thought. Healthcare professionals are held to high standards of moral character and an expectation to be patient advocates. This innate drive to do &ldq...

Virtually all healthcare professionals help patients who are experiencing pain; physicians, nurses, therapists, psychologists, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, radiologic technologists, and social workers each play a specific role in pain managemen...

Preceptors are role models for professionalism and best practices in the clinical setting, socializing nurses into the workgroup while educating and orienting. Besides working with new graduates, preceptors are assigned to healthcare providers who chan...

Medication reconciliation is a comprehensive review of a patient’s active medications during care transitions. It is a strategy that enables healthcare providers to make better prescribing decisions for patients. The Joint Commission (TJC) added ...

Stroke remains a major neurological problem in the U.S., affecting millions of people and their families. Stroke is the fifth-leading cause of death and the primary cause of serious disability. About 795,000 people experience a new or recurrent stroke ...

Pediatric patients with congenital and acquired conditions may require a tracheostomy tube. To care for a child with a tracheostomy tube, healthcare professionals must understand the reason the child requires a tracheostomy, the functional status of th...

Vaccine-preventable diseases strike millions of adults annually. While most children and adolescents remain up to date on immunizations, adults often do not recognize the need for routine vaccination. This course addresses various vaccine formulations ...

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is one of the most common GI complaints that healthcare providers encounter. The backflow of the acidic gastric or duodenal contents into the esophagus can result in heartburn. Healthcare professionals play an imp...

Transfusions are a life-saving intervention, but transfusion errors, particularly errors involving ABO incompatibility, can be deadly. Three actions that have frequently been a contributing cause for ABO incompatibility errors are incorrect labeling of...

Since 2000, the epidemiology of Clostridioides (formerly Clostridium) difficile infection (CDI) has changed with significant increases in incidence and severity. Recently overall incidence of CDI and healthcare-associated CDI h...

Heart disease is the leading cause of death caused by chronic disease in American adults, and stroke is the fifth most common cause of death in that category (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2020a). Elevated blood cholesterol causes n...

Drowning is the leading cause of death due to injury in children between the ages of one and four in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2019). It is estimated that five times that many children are treated for non-fata...

The purpose of this course is to inform nurses about the potential dangers of restraints and ways to reduce their use. The course includes an overview of regulations and standards of care for the use of restraints but emphasizes alternatives.

Swallowing is a complex process that requires the coordinated action of muscles in the tongue, pharynx, and esophagus. Many conditions and interventions can disrupt this process and increase the risk for aspiration. Dangerous complications of aspiratio...

Sex is an activity of daily living (ADL), yet many clinicians do not feel comfortable or capable of addressing it in practice. This course will identify evidence-based strategies for starting the conversation, along with resources for education and int...

Executive function impairment may result from a variety of medical conditions, including traumatic brain injury, stroke, and dementia. The ability of patients to achieve goals, including rehabilitation goals, may be compromised by executive function im...

Low back pain is a common complaint that will present in a variety of practice settings including the Emergency Department, primary care office, urgent care, and rehabilitation facility. While most cases of acute low back pain are benign, self-limited,...

Diabetes is a chronic condition that has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. Every healthcare professional needs to be aware of current diabetes practices. The purpose of this course is to communicate current information about diabetes, including...

The use of hospice and palliative care services continues to grow in the U.S. However, confusion about what the programs offer remains. This educational activity compares services and reimbursement for hospice and palliative care programs. Nurses shoul...

Lymphedema and wounds associated with it represent a difficult issue to deal with, primarily because the lymphatic system does not neatly fall into any medical specialty. Consequently, few clinicians are well versed in its pathophysiology or treatment....

Much of the literature indicates that although most people, given the choice, would prefer to die at home, many will die in institutions. Caring for a patient approaching the end of life continues to challenge the most skilled, educated, and talented p...

Stroke affects many people’s lives in many ways. To improve the outcomes of patients, nurses should understand the management of patients with stroke, including pathophysiology, treatment options, potential complications, and rehabilitation after...

Every clinician should be able to understand the values listed on an arterial blood gas report. Correlating the patient’s clinical picture with the ABG results is an example of critical thinking. Clinicians can readily interpret ABGs using the ba...

Clostridium difficile, a gram-positive, anaerobic, spore-forming bacteria, is the major cause of nosocomial diarrhea. The organism is clearly infectious and is transmitted via the fecal-oral route. The number of cases of nosocomial C. difficile and the...

Hypercoagulability disorder is a highly prevalent clinical condition characterized by abnormal blood coagulation, which leads to thrombosis inside the blood vessels. The most common clinical manifestations are deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary e...

This course has been approved for 2 hours by the Commission on Case Manager Certification for 03/01/2016 to 03/01/2019.

About one in five Medicare beneficiaries discharged from the hospital is readmitted within 30 days of discharge at a cost of $...

Each year, thousands of people are subjects in clinical trials, and millions follow the results in the media. The National Institutes of Health lists more than 273,000 active clinical trials in over204 countries categorized by disease condition, drug i...

Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus is an important pathogen in healthcare facilities and the community and is asymptomatically carried by people who are healthy, have chronic diseases, are hospitalized, or are in long-term care facilities. It ...

The goal of this interprofessional continuing education module is to provide an overview of the roles and interactions among a nurse, physical therapist, occupational therapist and speech-language pathologist as they address the complex rehabilitation ...

Only 57% of people with diabetes have well-controlled blood glucose levels. For some people with diabetes, help may already be here in the form of the daily or weekly dosed glucagon-like-peptide-1 receptor agonists exenatide (Byetta, Bydureon), liraglu...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease involving the upper and lower motor neurons that control voluntary movement. When neurons can no longer transmit impulses to the muscles, the muscles begin to atrophy, and w...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, progressive disease of the central nervous system (CNS) caused by damage to the protective myelin sheath covering neurons. It is estimated that there are more than 2.3 million people worldwide with MS. In the Unite...

More than 7.2 million persons in the United States have had hip or knee replacement procedures. The number of people having total knee arthroplasty has increased significantly in the past 25 years, driven in part by an increase in the number of aging p...

Home care for children who require long-term tracheostomies and mechanical ventilatory support has become a common alternative to hospitalization. Nurses play a critical role in preparing and supporting the family and other caregivers to provide care. ...

This module describes caring for patients who have undergone total hip replacement or knee replacement, stressing the pivotal role of the healthcare professional in educating patients to manage the transition from hospital to home. The module reviews k...

The prevalence of hypertension in the United States has increased dramatically over the past few decades, affecting more than 80 million American adults 20 years and older. Hypertension is the most common condition seen in the primary care setting. Fro...

Speech-language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, and nurses often work with clients suffering from traumatic brain injury, cerebrovascular accidents, or dementia. These conditions are frequently accompanied by confabulation, which ma...

Unlike hepatitis A and B, most patients newly diagnosed with hepatitis C are asymptomatic. The majority of diagnoses are made during biochemical or blood donor screening, or when symptoms emerge from advanced chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, or end-stage ...

Nurses and physicians are confronted daily with the responsibility to care for hospitalized children in pain. Nurses observe the patient 24 hours a day and thus become the pivotal group of healthcare professionals involved in the process of proper asse...

Healthcare professionals interact with people with spinal cord injury (SCI) in many practice settings, including the paramedic or EMT who extricates a patient from the scene of an accident, the ED nurse who encounters the patient immediately after inju...

Hypertension is a common chronic disease and is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease. This course describes the condition and the management strategies. It will increase the nurse’s knowledge about prescribed medications used to treat hy...

Stroke, the fifth ranking cause of death and a leading cause of disability in the U.S., is the country’s primary neurological problem. Each year, about 795,000 people have a new or recurrent stroke, costing more than $34 billion in medical care a...

Nearly 26 million Americans have been diagnosed with asthma, a disease marked by variable and recurring symptoms, airflow obstruction, bronchial hyper-responsiveness, and underlying inflammation. Inflammation of the airways and airway hyper-responsiven...

This course has been approved for 2 hours by the Commission on Case Manager Certification for 2017 and 2018.

Accreditation standards mandate the evaluation of patient understanding of teaching they receive during encounters with healthcare provid...

Many healthcare professionals view liver function tests as one of the most difficult sets of laboratory tests to interpret. A complex organ, the liver manufactures, stores, alters, and excretes many substances involved in metabolism. The entire body is...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provides multisite surveillance of the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder, reports that the average prevalence of ASD among those identified in school districts was about 1 per 68, with boys (1 ...

Coordination among nurses and rehabilitation professionals is imperative to improving the lives and outcomes of patients after a stroke. Each specialty has important, unique functions to perform, requiring careful management by a unified team. This mod...

Traumatic brain injury, also called acquired brain injury or head injury, occurs when a sudden trauma causes some level of injury to the brain. The leading cause of TBI in civilians is falls, accounting for 47% of TBIs, with another 14% related to moto...

Disparities in the prevalence, management, progression, and outcomes of pain-related conditions are widely recognized. Generally, minorities report greater pain, disability, and suffering when compared to whites, with influential sociocultural factors ...

The preceptor’s role is to help less experienced nurses identify learning needs, set goals for improvement, and provide feedback on their progress. Preceptors are role models for professionalism and best practices in the clinical setting, sociali...

Each year, about 17,700 people experience a spinal cord injury (SCI). In the United States, about 288,000 people live with a SCI. As a result, healthcare providers in many settings will care for patients with SCI, not only after the initial injury and ...

Epilepsy has been shrouded in myth and misunderstanding throughout history. It’s not a single disease entity; rather, it’s a heterogeneous group of disorders that have a common thread — abnormal nerve cell (neuronal) activity that pro...

Obesity affects the entire scope of a person’s life, including health, social relationships, self-image, and psychological well-being. Obesity rates in the United States remain the highest in the world. Now recognized as a chronic disease that mu...

Many people with diabetes have difficulty maintaining a normal blood glucose level. The Diabetes Control and Complications Trial and the Epidemiology of Diabetes Interventions and Complications study showed that intensive therapy can reduce the long-te...

Latex hypersensitivity was characterized as a problem in the late 1970s and increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared it a serious concern after reports of multiple deaths and over 1,000 documented r...

Public schools serve children with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment” possible, meaning most children are included in the general classrooms with supportive services built into their days. Healthcare professionals work with...

In 2019, an estimated 5.8 million Americans were living with Alzheimer’s disease. 5.6 million were older than age 65, and about 200,000 younger individuals had early-onset Alzheimer’s. An increasingly older population is expected to add to ...

Noninvasive positive pressure ventilation (NPPV) provides an exciting alternative to invasive methods of managing ventilation. Used in appropriate patients, NPPV provides advantages for patients versus endotracheal intubation. NPPV can also be used as ...

According to data from the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort study, approximately 34% of men and 17% of women have obstructive sleep apnea in the United States. Four to fifty percent of adults, worldwide, have diagnosable obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and many of...

The National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs found that 14.6 million children (ages 0 to 17) in the United States (19.8%) have special healthcare needs. Caring for a child with a disability or chronic health condition is often a lifel...

Although Parkinson’s disease (PD) has been recognized for about two centuries, awareness has dramatically increased with its acknowledgment by public personalities, such as actor Michael J. Fox and boxer Mohammed Ali. Reports about PD and its tre...

Polypharmacy, the concurrent use of several drugs, increases the risk of adverse drug reactions and interactions in older adults. Besides adverse drug reactions and drug-drug interactions, other clinical consequences of polypharmacy include nonadherenc...

This course has been approved for 4 hours by the Commission on Case Manager Certification for 2008, 2/12/09 through 12/31/09, 1/15/10 through 12/31/10, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Arthritic disorders are chronic diseases t...

Of persons age 50 and older, one in two women and one in four men will experience an osteoporosis-related fracture. The impact of osteoporosis is particularly severe as people age. Each year, osteoporosis contributes to about 2 million fractures that m...

Along with their therapeutic effects, most drugs can cause adverse reactions, including ototoxicity. Clinicians may encounter this potentially disabling and expensive problem in many settings and at any time. Learning to recognize signs of ototoxicity ...

The growth of the nursing profession depends on developing scientific principles on which to base practice. Nursing urgently needs sound studies to advance knowledge. Over nearly three decades, the terms “research utilization” and “ev...

About 2 million Americans already have some form of limb loss, and more than 185,000 new amputations are done each year.  The Amputee Coalition of America estimates that there are 185,000 new lower extremity amputations each year just within the U...

Nearly 2 million Americans already have some form of limb loss, and about 185,000 new amputations are performed each year. Losing a limb or being born with a limb that is partially or completely missing is a life-altering experience. Most people who ex...

The effect of caregiving on the health and financial well-being of family caregivers is significant. U.S. companies experience billions of dollars in lost productivity as a result of family caregiving’s effect on their employees. Nurses and other...

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, 8% to 10% of American children younger than 18 years have some sort of learning disability that has the potential to continue to affect them into adulthood. While the true preval...

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by airflow limitation that is largely irreversible. Nearly 16 million people in the United States age 18 and older have been diagnosed with COPD; millions of others have COPD but have not ye...

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the delivery of patient care by a provider who integrates clinical expertise with the best available evidence from systematic research. EBP is considered an essential component of high-quality healthcare. Using evidence...

Because people with diabetes are at greater risk for a long list of comorbidities, healthcare providers often must double as detectives to uncover complications. Several common, yet often underdiagnosed, complications are associated with diabetes. Peop...

Children's pain is undertreated for a number of complex and interrelated reasons. These include professionals’ misconceptions about pain and pain management and the complexity of pain assessment (particularly in nonverbal children). Additionally,...

Mentoring is not new to nursing; however, nurses often confuse mentoring with other career development relationships, such as coaching, precepting, or peer strategizing. Because of this lack of clarity in the literature, nurses need to understand the d...

The development of many vaccines in the last 70 years has dramatically reduced the cases of infectious diseases in the United States and around the world. However, recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases have underscored the challenges to the ...

Despite recent improvements in patient access to medical care in the U.S., diabetic foot ulcers continue to be a prevalent health problem. Interprofessional approaches used to manage other diseases have also been shown to help prevent the occurrence of...

According to a 2007 Institute of Medicine report, an astonishing 380,000 to 450,000 preventable adverse drug events take place in hospitals annually, causing patients to suffer injury or death. As much as $3.5 billion is spent annually on treatment of ...

Dementia in the older adult has become a major health concern. Resources, both human and financial, are challenged; the older adult population is growing by nearly 1.6 million a year, an increase projected to continue over the next 20 years. People old...

The purpose of this course is to familiarize the learner with some of the most common geriatric syndromes, outlining their diagnosis and evidence-based management.

At the conclusion of this course, the APRN will be prepared to:

discuss the ...

The purpose of this course is to familiarize the learner with some of the most common geriatric syndromes, outlining their diagnosis and evidence-based management.

At the conclusion of this course, the advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) wi...

The purpose of this course is to familiarize the learner with some of the most common geriatric syndromes, outlining their evaluation and evidence-based management.

At the conclusion of this course, the nurse will be prepared to:

discuss th...

The purpose of this course is to familiarize the learner with some of the most common geriatric syndromes, outlining their assessment and evidence-based management.

At the conclusion of this course, the nurse will be prepared to:

explain th...

The purpose of this course is to familiarize the learner with an assessment of polypharmacy amongst older adult patients and the evidence-based strategies to address polypharmacy.

At the conclusion of this course, the APRN will be prepared to:

At the conclusion of this course, the advanced practice nurse (APRN) will be prepared to:

explain the purpose of performing a comprehensive geriatric assessment for certain older adult patientsdiscuss the process and essential components of a com...

The purpose of this course is to familiarize the learner with the components and evidence-based methodology of a comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) for older adult patients.

At the conclusion of this course, the nurse will be prepared to:<...

During the past decades, advances in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cerebrovascular disorders have led to decreases in the prevalence of stroke (primarily ischemic stroke), but the high rates of morbidity and mortality, des...

Advances in pain science, in turn, have the potential to greatly assist healthcare providers in delivering more effective pain management approaches, in part through greater elucidation of disease-treatment relationships. Equally import...

This peer reviewed course is applicable for the following professions: Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner (ARNP), Athletic Trainer (AT/AL), Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA), Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS), Licensed Practical Nurse (L...

Methamphetamine, also referred to as “meth,” is an amphetamine derivative that is extremely powerful. It is frequently misused globally, and as will be seen, it can have considerable negative effects on a person’s physical, behavioral...

Cannabis species and subspecies have been used medicinally for thousands of years. In the United States, the regulation of cannabis as a Schedule I drug has hampered the study of cannabis and its medicinal uses. The legalization of marijuana in Califor...