Veteran's Healthcare Nursing CEU Courses

Clinical or major depression is a significant chronic disease worldwide. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with approximately 280 million people who suffer from depression and over 700,000 who die from suicide each year (WHO, 2021). This course will focus on depression, particularly on screening, mental health and physical health commodities, and treatment. The goal of this course is to provide nursing in acute care settings with information on identifying and screening for depression, its co-morbidities, and treatments.

This course will be discontinued on April 30, 2019, because a new version of it (60279 Interprofessional Guide to Pain Management) is now available.

Pain is experienced by almost all patients regardless of age or sex. Virtually all health professionals help patients who are experiencing pain, and physicians, nurses, therapists, psychologists, pharmacists and social workers can specialize in pain management. Thus, no single discipline completely understands pain, and how or why it manifests in individual patients. To provide comprehensive team-based care, professionals must understand the limits of their own expertise, while gaining insight from and an appreciation for that of other disciplines. This requires health professionals to collaborate to better assess, understand and manage patients with complex pain. By working together for the common goal of developing an effective, safe, comprehensive patient-centered treatment plan, patients with pain who don't respond to usual treatments can have more positive outcomes.

This course has been approved for 8 hours by the Commission on Case Manager Certification for 2008, 2009, 1/15/10 through 12/31/10, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

The course presents educational theories and reviews the process of patient teaching. It also addresses important topics, including the impact of culture, patients' compliance, teaching for different age groups and for those with low health literacy skills, and the importance of teach-back methods. The final chapter explains how to help patients evaluate the information they find on the Internet and lists a variety of organizations and government websites.

The Institute of Medicine estimates that about 100 million U.S. adults live with common chronic pain conditions. Nerve injury and even psychological factors can alter how a person experiences pain. Unmanaged chronic pain has significant and far-reaching consequences. Early and aggressive interdisciplinary pain treatment strategies are essential to avoid or reduce the long-term consequences and costs of chronic pain. The increased emphasis on management of pain to improve quality of life and functionality of people with chronic pain has contributed to an increase in the number of opioid prescriptions being written. Recent treatment recommendations, however, emphasize the need for a multifaceted approach that may include opioid therapy, nonopioid pharmacotherapy, and nonpharmacologic treatment modalities. This module describes the etiology and management of chronic pain and safe practices associated with the prescription of opioids for chronic pain.

Most people take prescribed medications properly, but many obtain drugs fraudulently, use medications that are not prescribed to them, or use more than prescribed or take them for reasons other than medically indicated. The nonmedical use of prescription drugs has been increasing rapidly in recent years. During 2015, an estimated 47.7 million persons in the United States age 12 years or older used illicit drugs or misused prescription drugs, a rate of 17.8 per 100 persons. This estimate includes use of marijuana, cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, and methamphetamine, and the misuse of prescription drugs. The most commonly abused prescription drug categories include pain relievers, stimulants, sedatives, and tranquilizers. Drug overdose deaths more than tripled from 1999 to 2015. Through 2015, drug overdose remained a large and growing public health crisis in the United States. This CE module provides nurses with information about prescription drug abuse, high-risk groups, factors related to misuse, and assessment/treatment strategies.