Incredible Health

Empowering healthcare professionals to find and do their best work.

Archives for 2020

The Top 5 Best Free CE Courses for Nurses

Earning your continuing education (CE) units doesn’t have to be a chore. Today, you can find many free nursing CE courses online. But how do you know which ones are worth it?

Here are some of the top free continuing education courses for nurses, plus some tips on how to choose the right courses for you.

Why You Need Continuing Education Courses

Continuing education units are a measure of the time that you have spent sharpening your nursing skills and keeping your knowledge fresh. They allow nurses to stay up-to-date on the latest evidence-based practice guidelines.

Continuing ed courses are also required by many state nursing boards to maintain your licensure in a particular state and for maintaining most specialty certifications. You can find out if and how many CEUs your state requires by visiting your state board of nursing.

The 5 Best Free Nursing CE Courses

Here are the top five free CE courses that you won’t want to miss.

1. Coronavirus: Everything You Need to Know

With the current ongoing pandemic, you can bet that this is a popular topic for continuing education. Learn what’s known about the coronavirus family, how they’re diagnosed, and what we know about treating them.

2. The One Hour Sepsis Bundle: How to Act in 60 Minutes

The Surviving Sepsis campaign states the goal for initiating interventions for sepsis is one hour. Learn about standard strategies for treating the leading cause of death in hospitalized patients in America and how you can help reduce treatment times.

3. Caring for Pediatric Patients: Developmentally Appropriate Interventions and Techniques

Caring for pediatric patients is challenging. It’s important to take into account the appropriate interventions during the developmental stage of the child, family responses, and culture. Pick up some expert tips and tricks about caring for children in each developmental stage, from infants to adolescents.

4. Opiates: How Nurses Can Help Curb the Epidemic

The opiate crisis in America is a public health emergency. Due to easy access to illegal and prescription opiates, approximately 130 Americans die of an opiate overdose each day. Learn how you can help change the course and curb this epidemic.

5. Nursing Documentation 101: How to Guard Your License

Documentation can be frustrating, but it’s a critical aspect of nursing practice. It’s essential for communicating with the treatment team and for defense against malpractice claims. This course looks at the elements of good nursing documentation, legal requirements, and common errors.

Get job matches in your area + answers to all your nursing career questions

Let's get started

What's your current role?

How to Choose Your CE Topic

While some states have some required classes, nurses are mostly free to choose whatever CE topics interest them or apply to their field or specialty. 

Consider the following factors when choosing CE courses:

  • Is it a topic that will help you learn more about your current specialty?
  • Is it a topic that might help you move to a different specialty?
  • Is it a topic that might help your overall nursing practice (like communication or documentation)?
  • Is it a topic you are genuinely interested in?

What to Look For in a CE Course

Regardless of whether CE courses are free or paid, there are several considerations to keep in mind when determining whether or not a CE program is worth your time.

Continuing education hours can only be awarded by programs that have been approved by an accrediting board. These include most states’ boards of nursing and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). 

Confirm how the program will provide you with documentation of your contact hours. Your best bet is to get a printable certificate immediately on completion. If your license renewal date is quickly approaching, you may not want to wait for a program to email you or, worse, snail mail you a certificate.

Find Free Nursing CE Courses in One Place

Want to know the best part about all of the CE courses listed? You can take all these courses with our 7-day free trial on Incredible Health. That’s right. You can get all 5 of these online, ANCC accredited courses (plus many more) from Incredible Health. So start your free trial today!

Nurse Bullying: What it is and How to Avoid it in the Workplace

Nurse bullying has been a hot topic in the nursing community for decades. In an article published back in 1986, the phrase “nurses eat their young” was coined by Judith Messiner, RN, MSN. The article explained how prevalent the hostility is among young nurses and their more experienced coworkers. 

Unfortunately, the problem hasn’t improved over the years. Counteracting issues related to nurse bullying is important not only for nurses and their careers but also for patient outcomes. In this article, we will go into depth on the subject of nurse bullying and how to avoid it in the workplace.  

“Rampant hazing, bullying, and sabotage [can be] so destructive that patients can suffer and, in a few cases, have died.” 

How Often Does Nurse Bullying Occur in the Workplace?

Believe it or not, 44% of nursing staff members have been bullied at work.

The director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Bellingham, Washington, Gary Namie, Ph.D., says the organization receives more calls from nurses than employees working in any other field. In fact, 36% of calls are from nurses while the next largest percentage (25%) are from those working in the education field.

In 2014, The Joint Commission discovered a mind-boggling 63% of cases that resulted in some type of unanticipated death or permanent death were traced back to some type of failure in communication between hospital staff. It is highly likely that many of these miscommunications stemmed from nurse bullying.

What Are the Different Types of Nurse Bullying?

Here are some of the most common forms of nurse bullying:

  • Calling names
  • Playing favorites
  • Intimidation
  • Cyber-bullying
  • Horizontal violence
  • Withholding of crucial information
  • Spreading rumors

Here is one story that exemplifies how detrimental nurse bullying can be:

“From her first week, Christi, a 27-year-old intensive care unit nurse at a North Carolina hospital, stood out. The hospital had a recognition program in which nurses whose patients complimented them to management got a star posted on a bulletin board. The once-bare board quickly filled with Christi’s stars. Her coworkers, a group of 14 mostly middle-aged nurses, glared at and whispered about her. When she entered the break room, they would “go dead silent,” she recalls. And Christi wasn’t the only victim. Nurses on another floor fat-shamed two of Christi’s friends, calling them rude names until they cried.

Worst of all, the clique members wouldn’t help Christi with patients who required multiple nurses. About four months into the job, Christi had a patient who suddenly lost consciousness. She pressed the code button to signal that she needed emergency assistance with a crashing patient. To her shock, nobody came. Alone, Christi grabbed the code cart outside the door, checked the man’s blood sugar levels, and saw that they’d dropped so dangerously low that he was at risk for a fatal coma. After Christi pushed dextrose through his IV, the man regained consciousness. “He turned out to be fine, but for a full five minutes, I’m sitting with this man on the floor in sheer panic. My patient could have died,” she says. “I was devastated because these are people who are ‘called’ to serve others. To imagine they would put a petty, personal bullying issue in front of someone’s life is just appalling.”

How to Deal with Nurse Bullying

All nurses have a right to feel safe and to be treated with respect in their workplaces. For many, though, it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether bullying is taking place, but nonetheless, it’s crucial to pinpoint instances of bullying and how to deal with them. 

Dealing with nurse bullying successfully is key to transforming all types of medical environments into safe places to work for the nurses and safe places for patients to receive care. 

To keep nurse bullying to a minimum and potentially eliminate it, all nurses and nursing department directors should keep in mind the five tips listed below.

  1. Always model good behavior: The key to curbing nurse bullying is to set a good example. CNO of SSM Health, Maggie Fowler, says, “I’ve always felt the best way to address bad behavior in the workplace is to begin by defining good behavior, including setting expectations on how we treat each other using common core values that embrace respect.”
  2. Document all instances of abusive behavior: There must be policies in place that encourage nurses to document all forms of workplace bullying. This means encouraging them to save any and all texts, emails, or letters that indicate how the bullying is taking place as well as the perpetrator(s). With documentation, it becomes easier to handle the situation in a proper manner.
  3. Make it easy to report instances of bullying: All nurses should feel comfortable reporting any documentation they have of nurse bullying as well as to simply talk about it with superiors. 
  4. Learn the difference between constructive criticism and bullying: Not all reported instances of nurse bullying are actually bullying. In some cases, it is discovered that constructive criticism was simply interpreted as bullying. Understanding the difference between the two is key for reporting bullying.
  5. Be supportive of victims of nurse bullying: “This show of support, by physical presence, reinforces that this type of behavior is unacceptable and that the rest of the team is united against the abuse,” Fowler says.

Get job matches in your area + answers to all your nursing career questions

Let's get started

What's your current role?

Alarm Fatigue in Nursing and How to Deal With It

Alarm fatigue in nursing is a real thing. It occurs when nurses become desensitized to the sound of patient alarm systems. According to the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, alarm fatigue is the sensory overload when clinicians are exposed to an excessive number of alarms. This can lead to nurses missing alarms.

Over the years, alarm fatigue has become one of the top 10 issues in acute care settings, particularly among technology hazards. In 2014, the Joint Commission mandated that alarm fatigue management become a primary National Patient Safety Goal.

Keep reading to learn more about alarm fatigue in nursing and how to counteract the potential dangers.

[More: Compassion fatigue in nursing] 

Why is Alarm Fatigue a Concern?

There are many contributing factors to alarm fatigue in nursing. One of the most crucial factors is alarm settings are rarely tailored to patients on an individual basis.

Researchers have also highlighted that not all medical facilities provide proper alarm-response training. When nurses don’t know how to properly respond to one or more alarms at the same time, this increases the risk of alarm fatigue. Without addressing the issue of alarm fatigue, it can lead to loss of life for one or more patients. 

Nurses also often suffer from alarm fatigue merely due to the number of alarms they hear each day. The John Hopkins Hospital once reported that more than 59,000 alarms sounded over a 12-day period. 

As one can imagine, the high number of alarm signals can overwhelm nurses, thus leading to alarm desensitization; this results in missed alarms as well as an increase in delayed response time to alarms.

How to Reduce Fatigue

There are numerous strategies nursing directors can use to lessen the likelihood of alarm fatigue. Here are the top three tips to help reduce alarm fatigue.

  1. Keep equipment clean. False alarms often occur because of dirty equipment. Not only is keeping equipment clean important for health and sanitation purposes, but also for reducing the number of false alarms that occur on a daily basis. Frequently change sensors that only get used once. Also, set up times to check and clean the equipment. This decreases the number of alerts caused by technical malfunctions.
      
  2. Reduce clinically inconsequential alarm sounds: “By switching cardiac monitor thresholds from ‘warning’ to ‘crisis’, daily audible alarm averages reduced from 12,546 to 1,424—a whopping 89%. This change not only increased nurse responsiveness but also dropped noise levels from 92 decibels to 70. BMC ensured that when a cardiac alarm sounded, it meant the event was clinically consequential and needed attention, prompting nurses to react to any instance.”
  3. Go mobile with alarm alerts: Going mobile with alarm alerts is easy with the right intelligent software. This allows the software itself to perform triage and prioritize the highest level alerts first.
    Intelligent software also provides escalation for unacknowledged alerts and allows hospitals to maintain a full audit trail of every notification.

Taking Alarm Fatigue Seriously

If you’re a nurse or thinking about becoming a nurse, consider the potential consequences of alarm fatigue and how to avoid them. 

One of the best ways to expand your knowledge about alarm fatigue and other nursing-related topics is to participate in nursing continuing education unit (CEU) courses. Check out these free nursing CEUs now. 

Get job matches in your area + answers to all your nursing career questions

Let's get started

What's your current role?

How Healthcare Employers Can Hire Nurses Faster During COVID-19

Over the past six months, the news cycle has been flooded with headlines about hospitals and nurses, and the trials and tribulations of both healthcare workers and health systems due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At Incredible Health, driven by our vision of helping healthcare professionals live better lives, we had to do more to both help nurses find better, more fulfilling roles while supporting healthcare employers in quickly hiring the permanent talent they need in a cost-efficient manner. 

We’re excited today to announce the formal launch of several platform updates aimed at helping healthcare employers meet nurse hiring needs during a critical phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The updates enable even more rapid and seamless hiring of permanent, specialized nurses to less than 12 days, while simultaneously avoiding the high costs associated with hiring temporary travel nurses. It’s a key step in keeping costs down for healthcare employers at a time when many have suffered substantial revenue-losses due to the pandemic. We’re proud that on average, the Incredible Health platform saves each hospital we work with at least $2M per year in travel nurse, overtime, and HR costs. 

Incredible-Health-Announces-New-Platform-Updates-to-Help-Healthcare-Employers

The new features, built collaboratively with our hospital partners, include:

  • Enhanced custom-matching algorithms: We are the only platform that uses automation to help screen the talent’s credentials and preferences, and automatically custom match the talent with employers. This increases the likelihood that a nurse is the right fit from the outset.
  • Automated interview scheduling: Automated, SMS-enabled scheduling requires zero IT integration. This enables 70% of interviews to be automatically scheduled within 36 hours of matching, reducing HR overhead costs. 
  • Remote interviewing: With hospital recruiters working from home, the need to reduce visitors at healthcare facilities, and in-person interviewing not possible, the option to interview remotely allows recruiters and nurses the freedom to complete interviews from the safety of their home.
  • In-app chat between employers and nurses: Increased communication speed in the Incredible Health iOS, Android, and web apps directly correlates with faster hiring and helps both parties complete the hiring process far more quickly.
  • Robust data analytics: In-app and custom data reports, including benchmarks with competitors and candidate response data, improves internal hiring processes.
  • Enhanced nurse profiles with specialty skills & references: Nurse profiles now have 45 specialties and 250 skills to highlight, including highly specific ICU and OR skills, highlighting custom-matched candidates that are best suited for each role. Employers also get access to pre-collected nurse references to aid hiring managers in rapid decision making. Nurses have continued access to our free continuing education courses. 

Used by more than 200 hospitals and health systems nationwide and hundreds of thousands of nurses, Incredible Health already has the fastest speed-to-hire process for permanent nurses, averaging about 24 days before the pandemic compared to the national 90-day average. Together, the new platform enhancements help accelerate the hiring process even further, at a time when hospitals cannot afford delays or additional costs from overtime and travel nurse agencies. Over the last several months, speed-to-hire has decreased to only 12 days, with an interview being sent through the platform every 20 minutes. Additionally, retention of nurses hired through Incredible Health’s platform is 15% higher at the one year mark than other hiring methods.

Incredible Health is doing more than any other platform to address the staffing needs for healthcare employers created by COVID-19. Rapid speed-to-hire of qualified permanent nurses is not simply a ‘nice-to-have’ during this healthcare crisis: it’s mission-critical to ensure the well-being of patients and the long-term financial health of these institutions. Hospitals have been hit hard by declining revenues over the last several months, and they need to avoid high costs whenever they can. With our new enhancements, we’re ensuring the well-being of patients and the long-term financial health of these institutions.

Read more about these updates and how we’re helping healthcare employers hire permanent nurses during COVID-19.

Iman Abuzeid, M.D., is the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, the largest career marketplace for permanent healthcare workers, with the mission of helping healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. The company founded in 2017, has raised $100 million from top venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and health systems Kaiser Permanente and Johns Hopkins, and is valued at $1.65 billion, making Iman one of the few CEOs to run a “unicorn” startup (a company valued at over $1 billion). Iman is an MD, and holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Iman’s immediate family has 3 surgeons, and as a doctor herself, she understands the importance of choosing the right stepping stones in a clinical career. It’s what drives her belief in Incredible Health and its potential to reliably help clinicians manage their career.

Read more from Iman

Incredible Health Recognized as top 150 Digital Health Startup in the World Transforming The Future Of Healthcare

Since launching in 2017, we have built Incredible Health to be the fastest-growing, venture-backed career marketplace for healthcare workers, in support of our mission to help healthcare professionals live better lives and find and do their best work. From assisting nurses in finding permanent jobs, helping top hospitals and health systems like Stanford Health Care, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, HCA and many more find nursing talent, and raising $15 million in our Series A, we’re proud of the platform, community, and momentum we have built to date.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Incredible Health has been selected as one of the companies highlighted in CB Insights’ Digital Health 150 ranking, which showcases the 150 most promising private digital health companies in the world. 

The second annual list highlights startups that are reimagining the lines of the traditional healthcare experience across 12 categories, from Administration Automation & Digitization and Virtual Care Delivery, to Drug Discovery and Specialty Care. The 2020 Digital Health 150 startups have raised over $20B in funding across 600+ deals from 900+ unique investors.

The 2020 Digital Health150 list is representative of many of the key themes and trends CB Insights observed across healthcare in the past year. One key theme is that the optimization of healthcare costs is a growing priority for all stakeholders – from patients and providers to plan sponsors and health plans. As a result, administrative workflow solutions are on the rise. While 20 companies on the list offer core services that target the operational and financial inefficiencies in healthcare, Incredible Health is the only hiring platform featured on the list. 

We’re proud to be recognized as one of the most promising private digital health companies in the world, as we continue to innovate to support nurses at every point of their career.

You can download the full 2020 Digital Health 150 report here. 

Iman Abuzeid, M.D., is the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health, the largest career marketplace for permanent healthcare workers, with the mission of helping healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. The company founded in 2017, has raised $100 million from top venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and health systems Kaiser Permanente and Johns Hopkins, and is valued at $1.65 billion, making Iman one of the few CEOs to run a “unicorn” startup (a company valued at over $1 billion). Iman is an MD, and holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Iman’s immediate family has 3 surgeons, and as a doctor herself, she understands the importance of choosing the right stepping stones in a clinical career. It’s what drives her belief in Incredible Health and its potential to reliably help clinicians manage their career.

Read more from Iman