How do you grow your nursing career? For most nurses, the answer to this revolves around learning more.
“Nurses, in general, are lifelong learners,” said June Thompson, lead nurse planner for Elite Healthcare. “They learn one area and then most of them want to go on to specialize in the same or even another area.”
Over Thompson’s 45 year career she’s found her calling in emergency nursing. During her career, she has continued to specialize in emergency nursing, has taught nursing in multiple universities, and has worked with students throughout the country to help them find their passion in some specialty area of nursing.
“That’s one of the beautiful things about nursing,” Thompson said. “You might start out in medical-surgical nursing and decide ‘I really like cardiovascular nursing, I want to become a specialist in that.’ The nursing curriculum in school works focuses on becoming a generalist nurse. It takes many more years to learn to specialize or become an expert in a single area of nursing. This is where the individual nurse has the opportunity for lifelong learning.”
Adding 90 courses to Elite Healthcare course library
In an effort to make more continuing education options available to nurses, Thompson was tasked with overseeing the addition of 90 new, high-quality courses to the Elite nursing library.
“We work with our course authors to ensure that each course is based upon evidence and best practices in the discipline,” Thompson said. All the articles are peer-reviewed.
“Nurses are curious people,” she said. “They’re never satisfied with where they are or what they know. There’s always something new. Whether that’s the opioid crisis, Ebola, tick diseases, measles epidemic, or vaping,” she said.
Thompson has overseen the growth of the current library to include more specialty content that goes beyond generalist courses and into in-depth subject matter.
Deep dives into specialty nursing areas
Now, with the additional course offerings, they’ll be even better positioned to satiate their desire to know more.
“Two [areas] I think about specifically are oncology and substance use disorder,” said Thompson, referencing courses that will be available in the improved library. “In each of those, they’re very large products. They go in great depth. Most of the content in both of those examples will help nurses if they want to study for the certification exams in those specialty areas.”
Getting more nurses certified to do specialty work helps improve the level of care across the board. “Those courses are so rich it gives us a great platform to create innovation,” Thompson said.
Not only that, but it helps fulfill the personal desires of many in this field. The impulse to advance and innovate is common among nurses who are always looking for ways to be better in their field. “Nurses are very hungry people to learn more,” Thompson said. “Our job as a publisher of continuing education content is to ensure that we have a variety, depth, and quality that we can feed to those nurses.”
Nurses who want to jump in and begin a new area of specialty can access all of the new courses here.
June Thompson’s top three course picks
Out of all the new courses added to the library, we asked Thompson which ones she liked most. In no particular order, here are her top three:
- Oncology Nursing, 4th edition — This program, reviewed Nursing Certification Corporation, is acceptable for recertification points.
- Pediatric Health and Physical Assessment, 3rd edition
- Maternal Newborn Nursing, 6th edition
Get unlimited access to all of these new courses, and more, with an Elite Nursing Passport.
[Editor’s note: 82 of the 90 courses are available now; the remaining courses will be released in the next few weeks.]
