Are you supporting continuing education opportunities?

[gerhan]

Since ASCP now has a requirement for newly certified techs to document continuing education, are facilities providing an increased number of activities and/or monetary support for staff to attend off-site activities? Did your facility provide these things before for general staff or just the supervisory level?

[Jane]

Our facility does a decent job of supporting continuing ed. I am trying to be more mindful myself of the need for bench techs to learn and keep up to date with new info in the field. We order tech sample and I just ordered check sample this year. As far as offsite meetings, our facility will pay for supervisors and above (and occasionally someone else) to go to out of state meetings. Bench techs can usually go to local meetings. They are sending me and one of my blood bankers to AABB this year!

[Cliff]

Being a larger facility, 100+ employees, even we don't have pockets deep enough to send all of our staff off-site for CE. What we do have though is many in house opportunities. We have always had a CE requirement for our staff, I am not aware of what ASCP requires. We allow things as simple as reading newsletters, we subscribe to ABC Newsletter, AABB Weekly and Citings.

As for AABB, we send about 10, but it's all management staff.

[John C. Staley]

We've required a minimum of 15 hours of CE for a number of years. Most of it is provided on site. We have enrolled in a couple of "on-line" activities as well as reading materials and check samples. There are local meetings that staff will occasionally attend but it has been a few years since we had any help for national meetings. I try to attend the Ann Arbor meeting every other year but asking for more than that is pushing the envelope.