Miranda Strand

One need simply to check a paper or read a weekly magazine to be astounded by the amount of stories about new medical developments, disease processes, growing dangers of disease, or innovations in medical and health care technology. The World Health Organization warns us to prepare for a potential worldwide Bird Flu crisis, we are threatened by terrorists with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and new methods for ACLS are released. How is a working nurse to maintain?

Nursing education provides the basic building blocks of nursing knowledge, and health-related, scientific, but understanding in the nursing profession requires a continuous procedure for continuing education. Continuing education for nurses is necessary for the nurse to stay current with the latest practice dilemmas and it's necessary for patient's safety too. Some states have created continuing education for nurses mandatory and require a certain number of course credit hours be attained before license renewal, or require certain mandatory course subjects, while other states leave it to the nursing professional them-selves to accept a personal responsibility for their particular continued learning. Regardless of whether nursing continuing education, or Nursing CEUS as such programs are frequently described, are required in one's state or not, all nurses who describe themselves as professionals have to be willing and ready to implement change in their own practice by realizing that understanding in any profession requires regular updating.

Methods of obtaining nursing continuing schooling hours and the pro's and con's of each:

1. Professional Journals: Most professional nursing journals offer an article for continuing education credit. Some offer a partial credit hour or one credit hour to readers who complete a test after reading this article and mail it in. Others charge $10 or maybe more, while some journals provide the credit for free and along with the difficulty of wanting to tear out a test form and mail it in the nurse has no official record of having taken and passed the course. Acquiring continuing education hours through professional publications is costly and ineffective because the cost of the diary itself has to be taken into account alongside the cost of the course if there is one, and the time and expense of mailing as well as the lack of official record of completion and lack of central maintenance of all credits accumulated from the nu