Types of Courses

Course Format	Description
Live Course	an event where participants learn live (either in-person or virtually)
Enduring Material (online only)	computer based continuing education activities that may be used over time or at the learner’s convenience.
Regularly Scheduled Series (RSS)	a course that is planned as a series with multiple sessions, or occurs on an ongoing basis (ex. weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc).

Types of Credits

Boston Children’s Hospital offers accreditation for the following credits:

• Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME)
• Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE)
• American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC)
• American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA)
• Council on Optometric Practitioner Education (COPE)
• American Psychological Association (APA)
• Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB)
• American Dental Association (ADA CERP)
•  Board of Certification for Athletic Trainer (BOC)
•  Commission on Dietetic Registration (CDR)
• American Physical Therapy Association of Massachusetts (APTA MA)

Maintenance of Certification Part II:
The boards that we currently approve: American Board of Pediatrics (ABP), American Board of Anesthesia (ABA), American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), American Board of Pathology (ABPath), and the American Board of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery (ABOHNS).

RISK MANAGEMENT CREDITS:
Risk Management must include instruction in medical malpractice prevention such as risk identification, patient safety, and loss prevention. In addition, it may include courses in medical ethics, quality assurance, medical-legal issues, patient relations, non-economic aspects of practice management, or courses designed to reduce the likelihood of medical malpractice through means other than increasing the licensee’s medical education and technical competence. Risk management study also includes a review of the Board’s Patient Care Assessment regulations (243 CMR 3.01-3.16) and participation on designated peer review committees dealing with quality assurance (Definition from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts).

Joint Accreditation^{TM    :} ANCC, ACPE, and ACCME — joined together to offer one path to joint accreditation for all of your interprofessional continuing education programs for health professionals.

Clear, measurable objectives tell your learners what to expect from your program. They also help you select appropriate teaching strategies and develop useful methods for assessment. Each course has a purpose or purposes that will go along with the learners needs. To show these themes it is necessary to list the goals of the course. For a continuing education program it is suggested to have between 3 and 5 objectives. In larger courses it may be necessary to separate the objectives based on the program.

Here are some sample objectives:

• develop strategies to manage a wide range of urological conditions in children
• analyze current techniques for surgical management of congenital and acquired urological conditions
• determine when a patient can be safely managed in the general pediatric clinic, and when subspecialty referral is appropriate
• determine the bench to beside applications of recent scientific advances to the clinical care of children
• evaluate traditional principles of care in light of recent scientific advances in pediatrics

Joint Accreditation^TM requires that all accredited continuing education providers design activities to change competence, and/or performance, and/or patient health. Providers must also measure the effectiveness of continuing education activities in fostering these changes. Continuing education activity directors are challenged, therefore, to develop objectives and content with the outcome of “change” in mind. Outcomes-based education starts from a simple premise: that the content should be defined by the desired outcomes. All elements of the planning process are therefore connected and held together by the overall purpose of the activity.

Writing clear learning objectives is an important educational practice that helps connect educational needs with content. The course learning objectives are derived from the identified needs and specify, ideally in measurable terms, what learners should be able to do after participating in the activity. Objectives are concise, well-written statements that express desired outcomes.

Clearly stated activity objectives act as guidelines to the development of content. Content may be sought or solicited based on what course planners feel will best achieve the stated objectives. In the same way, suggested content is held to the standard of the objectives and accepted or discarded based on its ability to meet the objectives.

Guide to Writing Learning Objectives

The review process for completed applications (not including corrections and edits) can take up to eight weeks.

Completed applications must be submitted at a minimum of 8 weeks prior to the intended activity date. Credit cannot be awarded retroactively.

If you would like Continuing Education to market your course, completed applications must be submitted to Continuing Education no later than 4 months for local programs, 6 months for national programs and 12 months for international program prior to the start of the activity. These dates will help ensure we can market your program in a timely manner.

For commercial support, please email continuingeducation@childrens.harvard.edu to discuss your needs.

Yes, you can have exhibitors at the educational activity. Please ensure that all signed exhibitor support forms are provided to the CE Department prior to the start of your activity.

Commercial Support: The ACCME defines a commercial interest as “any entity producing, marketing, re-selling, or distributing healthcare goods or services consumed by, or used on, patients. The ACCME does not consider providers of clinical service directly to patients to be commercial interests.” Commercial support is when a commercial interest provides money, goods or services to an activity. How the money is spent is up to the discretion of the provider and course director. Arrangements for commercial exhibits or advertisements cannot influence planning or interfere with the presentation, nor can they be a condition of the provision of commercial support for CE activities (ACCME). All commercial support solicitation and requests must go through Boston Children’s Hospital Trust.*

Exhibitors: Commercial exhibits and advertisements are promotional activities and not continuing medical education. Therefore, monies paid by commercial interests to providers for these promotional activities are not considered to be commercial support. All exhibitor funds should be revenue for the course, and do not have any relation to commercial support received (ACCME). *

*Rule for Both: Providers must ensure that their learners can participate in educational activities without seeing, reading or hearing promotional or marketing information from commercial interests. Further, accredited providers must ensure that the selling of advertising or exhibit space is a business transaction entirely separate from the acceptance of commercial support for accredited CME. (ACCME)

More Information: http://www.accme.org/requirements/accreditation-requirements-cme-providers/standards-for-commercial-support

A disclosure form is a document collected by the CE Department that asks all persons involved in an activity to disclose if they have any relevant financial relationships that could impact the content of the activity. Everyone that is involved in the course including, but not limited to: course directors, planning committee members, course coordinators, course administrators, speakers, and facilitators are required to fill out a disclosure form prior to the start of the activity.