Continuing education for the people who deliver care
Nine competency-based courses for clinicians and clinical leaders — communication, safety, ethics, and leadership under load. Each one is five modules, anchored in a story your team already knows.
Competency track
Streaming service
Showing 9 of 9 courses
Clinical Leadership
Running a unit, a shift, or a code — resource triage, team command, and the leadership that happens with no time to prepare for it.
Shift Leadership, Triage & Resource Allocation
One Shift: Leading an Emergency Department in Real Time
A single emergency department shift, told in real time, is the cleanest available case study in leading under load: too many patients, not enough beds, and a team whose performance depends on decisions you make in seconds. This course turns that pressure into a repeatable command practice.
The waiting room is full and two patients are deteriorating. Which decision are you making, and which one are you delegating?
What you'll be able to do
- Run a structured triage and reassessment loop when demand exceeds capacity
- Assign clear roles and closed-loop communication during a resuscitation
- Maintain situational awareness across a unit rather than a single bedside
- Hand off complex patients without losing critical context
Syllabus▾
Module 1. The Board as a Leadership Instrument
Anchor: Morning census
- Reading capacity, acuity, and flow at a glance
- Standing rules that prevent bottlenecks
- When to declare surge
Module 2. Command in a Resuscitation
Anchor: The first trauma of the shift
- Role assignment and closed-loop communication
- Cognitive load management for the team leader
- Calling it: stopping resuscitation with the room aligned
Module 3. Allocating Scarce Resources
Anchor: Two patients, one bed
- Ethical frameworks for bedside rationing
- Documenting the reasoning behind a triage call
- Escalation and asking for help early
Module 4. Leading Learners Under Pressure
Anchor: Teaching residents mid-shift
- Micro-teaching in ninety seconds
- Graduated autonomy and supervision thresholds
- Correcting a trainee without freezing them
Module 5. Handoff and Shift Closure
Anchor: End of the shift
- Structured handoff models and their failure points
- Loose ends, pending results, and shared mental models
- Debriefing a shift that went badly
Interprofessional Teams & Escalation
County General: Leading Multidisciplinary Clinical Teams
Care is delivered by teams that mix professions, seniorities, and incentives — and most preventable harm lives in the gaps between them. ER offers three decades of examples of nurses, residents, attendings, and techs succeeding and failing at the same handoffs your unit performs daily.
A nurse on your unit was right and was overruled. What in your team's design made that possible?
What you'll be able to do
- Design escalation pathways that work across professional hierarchy
- Facilitate interprofessional rounds that surface concerns early
- Delegate clinical work with clear scope and clear backstops
- Address a colleague's unsafe practice directly and professionally
Syllabus▾
Module 1. How Teams Actually Divide Work
Anchor: A trauma team in motion
- Role clarity versus role rigidity
- Scope of practice and safe delegation
- Shared mental models
Module 2. Speaking Up Across Hierarchy
Anchor: The resident who hesitates
- CUS, two-challenge rule, and graded assertiveness
- Why authority gradients kill
- Making it safe to be wrong out loud
Module 3. Escalation That Works at 3 a.m.
Anchor: Paging the attending
- Escalation criteria and rapid response triggers
- SBAR under stress
- The politics of waking someone up
Module 4. Conflict Between Professions
Anchor: Nursing versus medicine
- Interest-based conflict resolution at the bedside
- Repairing a relationship after a public disagreement
- Structural fixes versus interpersonal fixes
Module 5. Building the Unit You Want
Anchor: The department over a season
- Norms, onboarding, and what new staff learn in week one
- Measuring teamwork, not just outcomes
- Sustaining change through turnover
Quality Improvement & Organizational Change
How Can I Help: Leading Systems Change in a Health System
A new medical director tries to fix a public hospital by asking one question and changing everything at once. The show is idealistic; the course is not. It uses each attempted reform as a case in quality improvement, stakeholder resistance, and the difference between a good idea and a durable change.
Which of your improvement projects survived the person who launched it?
What you'll be able to do
- Frame a clinical problem as a measurable improvement aim
- Run a PDSA cycle that produces evidence rather than enthusiasm
- Map stakeholders and anticipate the resistance a change will generate
- Embed a successful pilot into policy, staffing, and budget
Syllabus▾
Module 1. From Complaint to Aim Statement
Anchor: The first staff meeting
- Problem framing and scope discipline
- Baseline data before intervention
- Choosing measures that cannot be gamed
Module 2. Testing Change Safely
Anchor: The pilot clinic
- PDSA cycles and small-scale testing
- Balancing measures and unintended harm
- Frontline co-design
Module 3. Stakeholders and Resistance
Anchor: The board pushback
- Mapping power, interest, and veto points
- Making the financial case for clinical quality
- Negotiating with skeptics without diluting the aim
Module 4. Equity as a Quality Domain
Anchor: Care for the uninsured
- Stratifying outcome data by population
- Access barriers hiding inside good averages
- Community partnership as clinical strategy
Module 5. Making Change Stick
Anchor: A year later
- Standard work, EHR defaults, and structural embedding
- Handing a project to an owner who did not invent it
- Sunsetting the reforms that failed
Patient Communication & Experience
Consent, bad news, cultural humility, and the conversations that determine whether care is actually received.
Serious Illness Communication & Consent
The Hardest Conversation: Breaking Bad News & Shared Decisions
Grey's Anatomy has staged more consent conversations, prognosis disclosures, and family conflicts than any residency will supply in five years. Used deliberately, those scenes are a rehearsal space for the conversations clinicians report as their hardest and least trained.
Recall the last time you told a family something they did not want to hear. What did you say in the first ten seconds?
What you'll be able to do
- Deliver serious news using a structured protocol without sounding scripted
- Run a shared decision-making conversation with real options and real tradeoffs
- Obtain consent that a patient could actually explain back to you
- Respond to anger, denial, and silence without retreating into data
Syllabus▾
Module 1. Setting and First Words
Anchor: The consult room
- SPIKES and comparable protocols
- Warning shots and pacing
- Physical setup, interruptions, and who should be present
Module 2. Prognosis Without False Certainty
Anchor: The survival odds conversation
- Communicating uncertainty and ranges
- Hope and honesty as compatible goals
- Numeracy and how patients hear risk
Module 3. Shared Decision Making
Anchor: Two treatment paths
- Eliciting values before recommending
- Decision aids and teach-back
- When the patient chooses what you would not
Module 4. Emotion in the Room
Anchor: The family that explodes
- NURSE statements and naming affect
- De-escalating anger directed at you
- Silence as a clinical tool
Module 5. Consent, Capacity, and Surrogates
Anchor: The unconscious patient
- Capacity assessment in practice
- Surrogate hierarchy and substituted judgment
- Documenting a conversation, not just a signature
Bias, Accessibility & Inclusive Practice
Different Minds: Neurodiversity, Bias & Cultural Humility in Care
A surgical resident on the autism spectrum is repeatedly judged on communication style rather than clinical judgment — and so are patients, every day. This course uses that mirror to examine bias in assessment, accessible communication, and what cultural humility looks like in a fifteen-minute visit.
When a patient is labeled difficult in a handoff, what information is actually being passed along?
What you'll be able to do
- Recognize where bias enters assessment, documentation, and handoff language
- Adapt communication for neurodivergent patients, colleagues, and families
- Use interpreters and health-literacy techniques correctly rather than nominally
- Interrupt a biased comment from a colleague without derailing care
Syllabus▾
Module 1. Bias in Clinical Judgment
Anchor: The resident under review
- Where implicit bias measurably changes care
- Labels that travel through the chart
- Evidence on bias training that works
Module 2. Neurodiversity in Patients and Staff
Anchor: Sensory overload on the ward
- Communication accommodations that cost nothing
- Environment, sensory load, and consent
- Accommodation as a workforce issue
Module 3. Language, Literacy, and Interpreters
Anchor: The family that nods along
- Teach-back and plain-language practice
- Working with professional interpreters
- Written materials people can actually use
Module 4. Cultural Humility in Fifteen Minutes
Anchor: Family decision making
- Curiosity over checklist cultural competence
- Family-centered and collective decision norms
- Religious and cultural requests at end of life
Module 5. Speaking Up About Bias
Anchor: The colleague's comment
- Scripts for real-time interruption
- Escalation when patterns persist
- Building unit norms that outlast the training
Patient Experience & Therapeutic Relationship
My Patient: Empathy, Continuity & the Experience of Being Cared For
Underneath the comedy, Scrubs is unusually precise about what patients experience: waiting, being talked about in the third person, and meeting a new clinician every twelve hours. This course converts that perspective into concrete practices that improve both experience scores and outcomes.
If your patient described today's care to a friend tonight, what would they leave out because they never understood it?
What you'll be able to do
- Structure a bedside encounter that patients experience as unhurried
- Maintain continuity of relationship across shifts and services
- Use empathic responses that measurably shorten, not lengthen, visits
- Interpret patient experience data without dismissing it
Syllabus▾
Module 1. The Patient's Timeline
Anchor: A day in the hospital bed
- Waiting, dependency, and loss of control
- Bedside rounds done with rather than about patients
- Small courtesies with outsized effects
Module 2. Empathy as Technique
Anchor: The intern learns to sit down
- Empathic statements and their evidence base
- Sitting, silence, and the perception of time
- Boundaries between empathy and over-identification
Module 3. Continuity Across Handoffs
Anchor: The patient with five doctors
- Introducing yourself and the plan every time
- Who owns the narrative for this patient
- Discharge as a communication event
Module 4. When Care Goes Long
Anchor: Chronic and repeat patients
- Relationship maintenance over months
- Frequent utilizers and the labels attached to them
- Caregivers and family as part of the unit of care
Module 5. Reading Experience Data
Anchor: Feedback after discharge
- What experience surveys measure and miss
- Complaints as clinical information
- Closing the loop with patients and staff
Ethics, Safety & Clinician Wellbeing
Error disclosure, moral distress, boundaries, and building a safety culture that survives a bad outcome.
Patient Safety & Diagnostic Error
Everybody Lies: Diagnostic Reasoning, Error & Disclosure
House is a diagnostic error machine: anchoring, premature closure, and brilliance that arrives one harm too late. Every episode is a usable case in how clinicians think, where reasoning fails, and what an organization owes a patient after it does.
Your last near miss — was it caught by a system, or by a person who happened to be paying attention?
What you'll be able to do
- Name the cognitive biases most likely to affect your own specialty
- Apply diagnostic timeouts and differential discipline in real workflows
- Disclose an error to a patient and family using a structured approach
- Distinguish blameworthy acts from system failure in a just-culture review
Syllabus▾
Module 1. How Clinicians Actually Think
Anchor: The whiteboard differential
- Dual-process reasoning and heuristics
- Anchoring, availability, and premature closure
- Where fast thinking is correct and necessary
Module 2. Building Reasoning Safeguards
Anchor: The case that turns
- Diagnostic timeouts and forcing functions
- Second opinions without ego cost
- Documentation that shows reasoning, not just conclusions
Module 3. When Harm Occurs
Anchor: The patient who is harmed
- Immediate response and duty of candor
- Structured disclosure and apology
- Working with risk management, not around it
Module 4. Just Culture Review
Anchor: The team debrief
- Human error, at-risk behavior, and reckless conduct
- Root cause analysis that does not stop at the nurse
- Second victims and clinician support after error
Module 5. Designing Safer Systems
Anchor: The department after the case
- Forcing functions, checklists, and alert fatigue
- Reporting systems people actually use
- Measuring safety culture over time
Moral Distress, Burnout & Impairment
Holding It Together: Burnout, Substance Use & Clinician Wellbeing
An excellent nurse hides a substance use disorder for years while her unit looks away. The show is unsparing about the mechanics of concealment, enabling, and the professional culture that rewards absorbing pain quietly — which makes it the right anchor for a serious course on clinician wellbeing.
If a colleague on your unit were struggling this month, who would notice first — and would they say anything?
What you'll be able to do
- Distinguish burnout, moral injury, and depression, and respond to each differently
- Approach a colleague you believe may be impaired, safely and per policy
- Set boundaries that protect both patients and your own sustainability
- Advocate for unit-level changes that address causes rather than resilience alone
Syllabus▾
Module 1. Naming the Condition
Anchor: The double shift
- Burnout, compassion fatigue, and moral injury defined
- Why individual resilience programs underperform
- Measuring workload honestly
Module 2. Moral Distress
Anchor: Care you cannot deliver
- Constrained agency and the distress it produces
- Ethics consultation as a practical resource
- Documenting resource-driven compromise
Module 3. Impairment and Peer Responsibility
Anchor: Concealment on the unit
- Recognizing signs without diagnosing colleagues
- Reporting obligations and confidential pathways
- Recovery, monitoring, and safe return to practice
Module 4. Boundaries and Recovery
Anchor: Life outside the hospital
- Detachment, sleep, and recovery science for shift workers
- Boundary scripts for extra shifts and patient attachment
- Help-seeking despite licensure fear
Module 5. Fixing the Unit, Not the Person
Anchor: The staffing meeting
- Scheduling, autonomy, and control as wellbeing levers
- Manager behaviors correlated with staff retention
- Building peer support that survives the first crisis
Crisis Response, Ethics & Public Health Communication
The Cost of Lies: Crisis Ethics, Risk Communication & Public Trust
Chernobyl is the definitive study of what happens when institutions manage information instead of managing danger. Healthcare organizations face smaller versions of the same choice during outbreaks, recalls, and sentinel events — and make the same mistakes in the first forty-eight hours.
In your last organizational crisis, was the first meeting about the problem or about the announcement?
What you'll be able to do
- Apply crisis-standards-of-care frameworks to allocation decisions
- Communicate uncertain risk to staff and the public without eroding trust
- Escalate a safety signal past organizational reluctance
- Run an after-action review that changes practice rather than assigning blame
Syllabus▾
Module 1. The First Forty-Eight Hours
Anchor: The night of the explosion
- Signal detection and denial
- Incident command basics for clinical settings
- Deciding with incomplete data
Module 2. Crisis Standards of Care
Anchor: Triage of the exposed
- Allocation frameworks and triage committees
- Protecting clinicians from bedside allocation alone
- Documenting and reviewing crisis decisions
Module 3. Risk Communication
Anchor: Telling the public
- Communicating uncertainty and changing guidance
- Internal versus external messaging alignment
- Rebuilding trust after being wrong
Module 4. Escalating Past Resistance
Anchor: The scientist who persists
- Whistleblowing, chain of command, and regulatory routes
- Building an evidentiary case
- Protecting the person who raises the alarm
Module 5. After-Action and Institutional Memory
Anchor: The trial and the aftermath
- Reviews that produce change versus reviews that produce documents
- Preparedness exercises with honest failure
- Holding lessons through leadership turnover
Bring this track to your hospital or practice
Grand rounds, unit cohorts, and team cohorts. Join the waitlist and tell us which track your team needs first.