It’s March already, can you believe it? Which means that the May 31st deadline is looming once again! As a nurse education provider we field many questions about CPD all year round, however in March, April & May we often hear the same questions every day. So we’ve compiled the most common, and answered them for you here.

As part of their 125 year celebrations, our long term client Rural Northwest Health is hosting a one day forum on 21 March 2016 at the Warracknabeal Campus, showcasing 20 Best Practice and Practice Innovations from health services across the Wimmera Mallee and Grampians region.

This week the two rural organisations we work with on an ongoing basis welcomed 10 new graduate registered nurses. It is an exciting time for all. East Wimmera Health Service welcomed six new graduates and Rural Northwest Health welcomed four new graduates. These are the biggest intakes ever and are the result of a conscious decision to increase employment opportunities for graduate nurses. So to read this month’s ANMF magazine article ‘Generation Next: helping graduate nurses and midwives find jobs’ by Robert Fedele, I got thinking.

As a nurse in Australia there are a lot of constants in your life;

• Washing your hands more often than you thought was humanly possible
• Horrifying your non-nursing friends with your dinner table talk (you mean you don’t want to talk about bowel movements while you eat?)
• Working Christmas/New Year/Easter – without doubt you will be working one of those days this year
• CPD. Every. Single. Year.

This is why we all need ALS training, especially in the country! In Victoria, many small rural health services, community health services and satellite health services rely on doctors or Ambulance Victoria to attend to patients who present at their service for urgent care. In these health services, a doctor is often not on site and may not be able to be contacted when a patient arrives or is already in the care of the service. It may take some time for the doctor to arrive at the health service in an emergency situation. In some rural towns there are no general practitioners at all!

It has been a long time coming, with the guidelines being released a year later than the usual 4 year interval – but they are finally here! Today ANZCOR (Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation) released new resus guidelines that are endorsed by the Resuscitation Councils of Australia and New Zealand.

Nurses, likes all care-giving professionals, have to sometimes work over Christmas. Most organisations have got a rotating system so if you work Christmas this year, you don’t have to next year etc. However it’s undeniably a part of the job that many friends and family just don’t understand.

It is no secret that many hospitals and other healthcare organisations are turning to the internet to help meet their organisation’s training requirements. But why are so many health professionals turning to eLearning?

All workplaces can become breeding grounds for stress – that’s just a truth in the world we live in. Many workplaces have introduced their own measures to reduce their staff’s stress levels. Here at the LearnPRN office we bring our dogs to the office. Nothing calms you down after a morning of deadlines quite like a dog at your feet. However, we think there might be an infection control issue or two in bringing dogs to work if you’re a nurse! Therefore, we wanted to look at some effective tips for nurses to reduce their stress in the workplace.

We at LearnPRN and Nurse CPD Online have rounded up the five Top TED talks that we think are must-see viewing for nurses. Never heard of TED? That’s ok! TED’s mission is to spread ideas via short talks that are filmed, and shared online. Here we have five short (20 minutes or less) talks that we think can help you in your healthcare organisation.