Month: April 2009

I’m headed out on the road today for a series of trips that will take me to Chicago, Vicenza Italy, DC and Newport RI over the next 13 days (look for me at a Continental gate in an airport near you). Posts will be a bit lighter, but should still be up regularly. Bear with me, though, if the spelling or grammar gets nutty–1st things to go when my brain is overloaded.

It’s an interesting idea–using a computer game to provide education about genocide. That’s what mtvU has done with Darfur is Dying, “a narrative-based simulation where the user, from the standpoint of a displaced Darfurian, negotiates forces that threaten the survival of his or her refuge camp. It offers a faint glimpse of what it’s like for the more than 2.5 million who have been internally displaced by the crisis in Sudan.”

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.

Okay, this isn’t online education information; it’s online educator information and it’s probably about time we got around to this. Because in this economy, not only are more and more of you coming to visit me on a regular basis, you’re also contemplating (or actually implementing) your own trainings. So allow me to point you toward a helpful resource.

If you’re feeling woefully uninformed when it comes to the clinical presentation of drugs of abuse, rn.com has a host of online CE courses on the subject. Most of them are $5 and provide 1 CEU after reading the materials and completing the corresponding posttests.

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.

This week, over at the Sustainability blog:

• Online resources for program evaluation
• The challenges of time management and a short piece on using your time productively
• Some thoughts on succession planning–who’s going to take over your program after you go? Not sure? Now’s a good time to consider the question.
• Live STI clinical courses sponsored by the CDC
• An initial conversation about writing

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

I’ve posted a bit in the past about learning the languages of our patients, since using translators can present a host of challenges. Just learning some basic terms can help create relationships with our non-English speaking patients, even if translation is still necessary. Open Culture has a list of free, online language lessons available, and the variety is impressive. Be sure to scroll through the comments, as well, where readers have added sites of their own.

(Open Culture, via Lifehacker)

In honor of our 5,000th hit (which for a little niche blog like mine that hasn’t quite been around for 3 months, is something) I added a world map widget to the bottom of the page yesterday. Just to see where readers are visiting from (the one thing my stats page can’t tell me). And while the widget doesn’t seem to be keeping pace with the site (it’s reporting 36 hits since yesterday and we actually have more than 10x that figure), it’s fun to see that we have friends in the UK, Canada and Australia thus far.

Thanks for reading, everyone.

Since I loaded you with posts yesterday (and according to my stats page A LOT of you are working your way through the cervical images today–wow, people), a nice bite-sized podcast to have with your morning latte. The CDC, always a reliable source for content, has a podcast on Blast Injuries: What Clinicians Need to Know. It clocks in at under 3 minutes–barely enough time to set the speed and incline on your treadmill. However, if this brief audio isn’t enough to satisfy your need for info on the subject…

By way of The Hub, April is also Genocide Prevention Month.

I think that’s all of them, now.

Last week, in a comment about the STI Clinical Guide,  I was asked about cervical images unrelated to STIs. Having searched a bit, I found a few sites that provide images to review. One of the best was over at the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research.