Category: Uncategorized

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.

Hepatitis is the often forgotten conversation when it comes to sexual assault medical-forensic care. I find a lot of folks are skipping over it in trainings and in working individually with patients, even though we know that many of our patients may be at greater risk for contracting hepatitis than HIV. The University of Washington and the Seattle STD/HIV Prevention Training Center have teamed up for an online course on viral hepatitis, funded by the CDC.

Sunday is International Women’s Day, and the 2009 United Nations theme being used for the day, fittingly enough, is Women and Men United to End Violence Against Women and Girls. Social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, have created networks in honor of IWD; there are also almost one thousand events in more than 60 countries in honor of the day. This includes more than 300 events in the US and Canada, alone. Although some of these events have already occurred, there are still plenty happening over the weekend.

Let us know if you end up attending one!

There’s a lot of chatter in my on-line world right now about the so-called No-Lie MRI (or as it’s known in the scientific community, fMRI, f=functional). Some people believe brain imaging, alone or as one tool in a larger arsenal, may provide the ability to determine if someone is lying. The legal world, not surprisingly, is fascinated by this concept, but it seems like it’s a long way from being able to meet Daubert/Frye standards. Still, people are certainly talking about the potential this technology could have and the ethics of using it (on assailants, yes, but also on victims).

Audio Digest has free podcasts available on a range of disaster-related healthcare topics. You can download audio files on PTSD, principles for initial response, infectious disease, incident management and disaster mental health. Even better, they have kindly segmented the files, so you have the option of downloading just parts of the podcasts or the whole megillah.

Looking for more on FGM? Check out the Female Genital  Cutting Education and Networking Project for a host of resources and up-to-date information.

Here’s a post for those of you interested in exploring other aspects of forensics (assuming this isn’t your current focus): Introduction to Legal Nurse Consulting. It provides 2 CEUs and if offered in a typical article-posttest format. Cost is $60.

Continuing the legal theme: What the Nurse Should Do to Prepare for a Deposition is a CEU offering that just showed up in my inbox over the weekend. o.5 CEUs are available and the cost is $15. It’s a standard article-posttest format, from what I can tell. Could be pretty basic. However, legal CE offerings for healthcare providers are few and far between, so it’s worth checking out. If anyone takes it, please let us know.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has a pretty incredible online course on international forensic investigation. What may be most unbelievable is that it is offered free of charge. Although it doesn’t appear that CEs are attached, don’t let that deter you–there is some seriously chewy content in this offering.

I’m a big fan of ideas. I love hearing about the creative ways people view the world; I love hearing about people’s successes (and failures, from which I learn quite a bit). I keep a notebook with my own ideas, many of which have meade their way into the world in one fashion or another. And  I am always impressed when people do things others said were impossible. So for your weekend inspiration, here is a video of Bill Strickland’s talk at TED in 2002. I won’t introduce him, because I can’t possibly do the intro justice. Suffice it to say: he’s inspirational and he provides a great example of how to give a presentation that gets the job done. Enjoy.

The American Nurses Association is offering 1.91 CEUs for their online course, Lateral Violence: Nurse Against Nurse. Cost is $20 ($15 if you’re an ANA member) and is in traditional article-posttest format. CEUs are available for this course only through the end of 2009.

The CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH) has a slide presentation on injury and violence in schools, available for use by the public. It addresses intentional and unintentional injury; suicide/violent deaths; and prevention and response strategies. The stats are a bit old, so it would probably be beneficial to update them if you were to use them for more than just self-education. You might also want to run spell-check on the slides before using them in any formal way (because someone at CDC didn’t).

AHRQ hosted Lessons Learned from the Field of Emergency Preparedness, last November. You can listen to a webcast of the session and view PowerPoint slides in their archives at no cost. According to the site, presenters shared key insight on customizing tools in order to address the distinct needs of their communities. Emergency preparedness planners as well as Federal, State, and local community health planners, providers, and first-responders attended.

PESI is hosting a webinar on compassion fatigue prevention and resiliency, Friday, March 13th from 2-3:30pm ET. Cost is $59, but that fee allows an unlimited number of participants at any one site. Participants will receive 1.5 CEUs per site (additional CEs are $39 each). CEs also available for psychologists and social workers. You can see the outline for the presentation here.

Help out your fellow readers, please. If you’ve participated in something you learned of on this site that was either really useful OR a colossal waste of time, do us all a favor and post your review in the post’s comment section. It’s particularly helpful for items which have an associated fee.

Thanks to all of you who have done so already.

So, our little blog has been added to Alltop: confirmation that we kick ass (seriously–look at their badge). We’re in the health section.

Check it out here.

Because prior cultural competency posts have been popular among visitors to this blog, here is a self-assessment tool created by the National Center for Cultural Competence at Georgetown University. It is specifically geared toward healthcare providers and is web-based, so it’s easy to complete.

The latest edition of the Journal of Forensic Nursing just came out; included is an article on accurately aging bruises. While it doesn’t conclusively refute the practice, it does provide yet another layer of support against it.

IAFN members & subscribers can read the article online by logging into the member center. If you aren’t an IAFN member (and I ask, why not?) or subscriber, you can read the abstract here.

Learningtext.com is offering 4.8 CEUs for their self-paced online course on nursing ethics. Users have 3 weeks from the time of payment to complete the online program (cost is $29). The focus is on general nursing ethics across specialties. It’s marketed as being interactive and includes 4 modules and what appears to be a boatload of resources (at least from the marketing material). You can view the course syllabus here.

If you know me, you know that I am a fairly curious individual, (which is a polite way of saying I’m nosy). I like to know things. I like to know about things. I am, you could say, a student of stuff. Although studying is not required of me by my hospital, or the university where I teach, or the organizations for whom I work (or my dad, who had a terrible time making me into a student), I spend a chunk of my day, every day, doing just that.