Ep #137: Continuing Education for Nurse Practitioners: Requirements and Resources

Welcome to the Real Deal Nurse Practitioner Club, the podcast for nurses who are ready to pass their boards and thrive in their careers as real deal nurse practitioners. I’m Anna and I’m the Director of Nursing Content at Blueprint Test Prep. Whether you’re deep in exam prep or stepping into practice, I’ve got you. It is time to become the confident, knowledgeable NP that you’re meant to be. Let’s dive in.

Hey, hey there! Welcome back to the Real Deal Nurse Practitioner Club podcast. It’s Anna here, and today we’re just going to do a very quick episode about some of the different ways that you can earn continuing education credits for your NP license and certification.

Think about your NP journey. You graduated NP school or you will very soon, you’ve passed your board exam, and you’ve applied for licensure in your state, but then you start reading all of this information about continuing education for renewal and you think to yourself, where do I even begin?

In today’s episode, we’re gonna cover the basics of what you need to know about continuing education credits for NPs so that you can renew your certification and your licenses with ease, and we’ll include some helpful places to earn them.

So first off, do nurse practitioners need to earn CE? As you have probably already guessed, the answer is yes. Continuing education credits are a requirement for maintaining certification and licensure in most states. So that means you’ll need continuing education for your board certification, so your FNP or your PMHNP through the certifying body AANP or ANCC for example, plus your state license for both your RN and your NP, and then even additional licenses like your DEA license to prescribe controlled substances.

And what’s the point of all of this continuing education? The main reason is that it’s a way for NPs to stay up to date on changes in evidence-based practice and clinical guidelines. And that allows for better patient care, which is always our number one goal. The nursing profession has repeatedly embraced lifelong learning and continuing education is just one way of supporting that.

Continuing education can allow you to explore new topics. Are you interested in learning more about dermatology or aesthetics? You can take a course. Or maybe do you wanna brush up on your understanding of diabetes medications? Take a course.

Engaging in lifelong learning through continuing education has plenty of other benefits. For starters, it can lead to increased job satisfaction by boosting your confidence and just becoming more engaged in your specialty. Also depending on what activities you choose and if they lead to additional certifications, you may set yourself up for additional job opportunities and professional growth.

Now when we’re looking at the specific requirements for certification and licensure, it can get a little bit tricky. And that’s because the continuing education requirements vary greatly from state to state.

And so you will need to check with your state’s board of nursing for the requirements of your RN and your NP licenses. And yes, you do need to maintain your license as an RN while practicing as an NP. So make sure you understand the CE requirements for both of these. And then you’ll also need to check the requirements for your board certification and any other additional certifications you hold.

Most CE requirements for NPs are divided into pharmacology and non-pharmacology hours, so you’ll need to make sure you have enough of each. And then in addition to those, there may be specific topics that you’ll need to review. So for example, some states require child abuse screening and reporting education with each renewal. Some require controlled substance prescribing education as well.

One more thing to go over here is the difference between the types of continuing education credits that you may see. Because you may see activities listed with a certain number of contact hours, CEUs, which stands for continuing education units, CMEs, which is continuing medical education, or even AMA category 1 credits. And so what does all of that mean?

Well, you can use the conversion of 1 CME credit to 1 contact hour, and that 1 CEU actually equals 10 contact hours. And then those AMA category 1 credits, they are a specific type of CME approved by the American Medical Association, but NPs can still complete and use them.

The bottom line is just make sure you’ve reviewed and understood all the requirements well before you need to renew. Different organizations may specify contact hours, while others use CEUs, and so you’ll just want to know how to calculate all of your continuing education credits. And with that, stay organized. Keep dedicated files of all of your CE certificates so that you can upload them when they’re needed. And it is going to make that renewal process so much smoother.

Now, on a lighter note, there are lots of different CE activities nurse practitioners can partake in. There are tons of online courses and webinars that allow you to learn on your own time and from anywhere. Another form of continuing education that’s gaining popularity is journal clubs. These can be virtual or face-to-face meetings in which a group of participants reviews an article and answers questions in a written and a verbal format.

Now, let’s say you wanna network or you wanna learn new skills. There are CE opportunities for those things as well.

You can attend conferences at the local, state, or even the national level, and these provide great networking opportunities. And say you want to learn new suturing techniques or learn to do aesthetic injections or an IUD insertion, then a skills workshop can provide you with the education you need to master these new procedures. And if you’re in the mood to travel, you can earn continuing education credits at top resorts and destinations across the country. I mean you can even go on a cruise. The possibilities really are endless. So you are guaranteed to find continuing education opportunities that fit your interest, fit your schedule, and fit your budget.

So let’s also talk about where you can earn your CE credits. One place to start is probably something you use every single day in clinical practice, and that is all of these point of care medical reference applications like UpToDate. For example, in UpToDate you can earn credits just by searching for topics and in Hippocrates subscribers have access to a large library of CE courses. And then you can also check out CE activities from your certifying body, such as through the AANP or the ANCC. They have a lot of CE content online, and they make it easy to upload any required documents right into your recertification application when the time comes.

And then of course, we have CE activities at SMNP reviews. So things like our crash course, our diagnosis course, our pharmacology course, our question bank, our live study group, all of these offer their own amounts of contact hours as well. Really, continuing education is just a great way to expand your knowledge, network with colleagues, advance your career, and ultimately provide the best care to your patients.

And it can seem overwhelming when you’re first learning about all of these different requirements you have. And you might be wondering how you’re gonna get them all done, how you’re gonna keep them all organized. But just remember, there are so many different ways and places to earn your CE credits. In your NP position, you’ll also likely have professional development funds that you can use towards continuing education, so make sure you ask about that in the interview process and make sure you use them. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this episode and I’ll talk to you next time.

 Thanks for listening to another episode of the Real Deal Nurse Practitioner Club. If you want more information about the different types of support that we offer to students and new nurse practitioners, you can visit npreviews, with an S, dot com. We’ll see you next week.