Newswise – Nearly 5 million people in the United States live with heart failure. To ensure that patients with cardiovascular disease in South Florida receive care from knowledgeable and knowledgeable nurses, Broward College’s Continuing Education and Workforce Development Program is offering a new advanced course on heart failure. This class is now part of a wide variety of specialty nursing offerings, such as emergency and critical care nursing courses, which have been created through the Broward Specialty Nursing Consortium, a unique partnership, like nowhere else in the United States, between the College and a group of healthcare professionals – made up of the North Broward and South Broward Hospital Districts, in collaboration with Holy Cross Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic – to meet the immediate needs of South Florida’s ever-changing healthcare environment.
“Broward College is honored to be part of the Broward Specialty Nursing Consortium and to work with so many wonderful healthcare systems,” said Donna Merolle, Dean of Continuing Education and Workforce Development. “What we are doing is completely unprecedented because there is no other partnership like this between hospital systems and colleges anywhere in the United States.”
The Broward Specialty Nursing Consortium was formed over 10 years ago with the goal of pooling resources and educating nurses. The consortium now covers 11 hospitals within the four major health systems and trains a diverse group of nurses. In 2014, Broward College had over 1,000 students taking specialty training courses.
Each course is designed to be in a blended learning format, where students share their learning time individually, through online and classroom learning systems. Nurses also learn by simulation at Broward College’s Health Sciences Simulation Center, and some courses have a clinical requirement, where students work in hospitals. Providing this blended format allows nurses to engage in the learning process, respecting their individual learning styles.
“Last year, when a need for more perioperative nurses was identified, we created a perioperative nursing course to prepare nurses for this specialty,” said Mimi Weber, administrative director and head of the organizational development learning at Memorial Healthcare System. “The new Advance Heart Failure course is another wonderful example of how Broward College continues to be an invaluable resource to the community by supporting the needs of many local hospitals.”
For more information about Broward College’s Continuing Education and Workforce Development Program, visit http://www.broward.edu/academics/ce/health/Pages/default.aspx, or contact Angela Nicoletti at 954-201-7939 or [email protected].
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About Broward College:
Serving more than 68,000 students each year, Broward College offers residents certificate programs, two-year college transfer degrees, two-year career degrees, and bachelor’s degrees in select programs. The college’s mission is to provide high quality, affordable and accessible educational programs and services to a diverse community of learners. For more information, visit www.bward.edu.