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Message from the Chair
Maria Jackson, R.N., B.S., M.A., Chair, NPG
In the past three years, the Executive Board of the Nurse's Professional Group has focused much energy into developing educational opportunities for our membership. Nursing education has been a priority for several reasons. Nurses comprise a large and integral part of the REI medical team, yet no standardized course of study has been available to train new nurses or further the education of experienced nurses in the field. A certification exam offered by NCC (for a short time) was discontinued in 1995. Another incentive for the formation of this course involves recent legislation
to renew a nursing license. Many states across the US have changed their policy and now require a nurse to earn a minimum number of CEUs per year; some only accept the CEUs in the nurse's specialty.
Opportunities to earn the needed number of contact hours for many nurses often means using up hard-earned vacation time and finances to travel to industry sponsored meetings
and the ASRM Annual Meeting or relying on the support of their medical directors to attend. Sadly, some nurses have neither the time nor the money to spare, nor a generous employer who understands the benefits of education to the nurse, her patients and the practice. Nurses spend a considerable amount of their time educating patients, fielding patient questions, and can have a significant impact on patient loyalty, based on the quality of the care they deliver.
In an effort to make education more available, NPG has been working on two online projects offering CEUs that will be available to the membership on our website. The first is a Certificate Course in REI nursing. The course content and syllabus has been reviewed by the ASRM Practice Committee to ensure accuracy. The course structure will consist of "live" on-line presentations divided into eight modules in the following areas:
- Reproductive Physiology and Pathology
- Fertility Workup and Testing
- Infertility Pharmacology
- ART and Fertility Procedures
- Third-Party Reproduction
- Psychosocial Aspects of Infertility
The second project is a more basic infertility course that will also be offered on our website. Training new nurses in the field has been difficult without a formal course of study. This basic course will be geared to the less experienced nurse in the field and will be accompanied by a list of competencies that each new nurse should be expected to know. This project, a collaborative effort, has been developed in response to the needs of our members. Moreover, courses such as these attract nurses in the OB-Gyn community who also treat infertility patients. Many of these nurses want more information about infertility treatment to help them manage this growing subset of their patient population more effectively.
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Society for Reproductive Medicine
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