Make money from CEU nursing conference
Tips From the Field
Make money from CEU nursing conference
Vendor fairs draw a crowd
Homecare education managers know their role is crucial, but why not remind everyone else with a profitable nursing conference that offers continuing education units (CEUs) to participants?
For the past eight years, the Rutland Area Visiting Nurse Association & Hospice has done exactly that. The agency, which serves two counties in southwestern Vermont, co-sponsors nursing conferences at a local medical center. The conferences typically have a theme and provide attendees with the newest information on some aspect of nursing. For example, past conferences have focused on wound care and related nursing, assessment, education, and hands-on skills. The 1999 conference will be about health care research.
"We link it with a vendor fair," says Kevin Loso, associate director for development. "We’ve opened the conference up to our staff, the medical center staff, and to staff of local health care facilities."
Steps to profitability
Attendees receive credit for educational contact hours, approved by state officials. Exhibitors pay $80 to $85, and nurses pay $60 to $65 each. For the agency’s own staff, the agency would pay a $25 per person charge out of the agency’s educational budget.
The conference features lectures and, when appropriate, hands-on training, as well as educational handouts and teaching tools.
One the requirements to receive CEUs is for participants to carry a "passport" to the exhibitors’ booths and ask them to stamp or sign it. Loso says the exhibitions are educational because they often highlight new techniques or devices that nurses will need to learn how to use; they were an essential part of the wound care conference.
"This specialty area is very product-dependent, and we can’t talk about wound care without people being able to see the products," says Nancy Faller, RN, MSN, PhD, CETN, ET nurse clinical specialist with Rutland Regional Medical Center in Vermont.
Faller has helped with the conferences in previous years, and for the 1999 conference, she prepared a lecture on clean vs. sterile wound care, a topic she covered for a doctoral thesis.
Not counting staff time in preparing for the event, the conference usually generates $2,500 a year, Loso says.
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