This is one of those questions that I hear from people that are not sure whether or not they want to spend the money on a workshop and feel that the content available to the public on social media and through free open access medical education (aka, FOAMED) routinely ask. The overwhelming amount of information available online does allow the learner a fair amount of flexibility if they do not want to make the trip across the country to a conference, pay for time off work, and pay for the registration for the training as well. With that in mind, here are a few reasons why you absolutely SHOULD consider learning office procedures and suturing from Skills On Point rather than from the good ‘ol interweb.
1. Who are you learning from?
First and foremost, many self-professed instructors that you may learn from are nothing more than students themselves that happened to be in either medical school, physician assistant training, or nurse practitioner training. There’s nothing wrong with passing on information to those who do not yet have the skill, but it is very frequently that I review content that is sent to me from our previous students to find that there is 90% accurate technique, 10% inaccurate technique. Unfortunately, it’s the inaccurate technique that ends up causing wounds to fall apart, procedures to end in additional expert consultation to repair, and an overall poor patient experience.
Understanding concepts like skin tension lines, when to use differing types of sutures, multiple layer closure, and honestly being able to present more content than four or five rudimentary techniques is an exquisitely important delineation when going to a suturing workshop and expecting to learn quote “advanced techniques”.
All of the instructors for Skills On Point actively work as first assistants in the operating room, which means that they spend their days performing the skills that they are teaching and can stand behind any question thrown to them from an audience of anywhere from a novice to expert learner. The combined suturing experience of our instructor bank is well over 100 years with varying fields of expertise including cardiothoracic, orthopedic, general surgery, and plenty more. You simply can’t expect the same level of expertise from a social influencer providing instructional know how unless they are at that level.
2. What supplies are you using?
Nurse practitioner continuing education unfortunately has been riddled with awful supplies. Having personally gone to multiple conferences and used anywhere from a piece of memory foam, a banana, instruments with no teeth or finger holes so small my fingers couldn’t even fit in them, sutures that were so expired they literally disintegrated, I can speak from the experience that when Skills On Point was founded, one of the first guiding principles was that we were going to offer students expert-level supplies in our training.
Not only does it speak to the professional level that we aspire to as nurse practitioners and physician assistants, but if I have eight hours or perhaps 16 hours of your time to teach you suturing techniques and office procedures, I would like that time spent entirely focused on your hands-on skills rather than worrying about your instruments being a distraction from that learning. We directly manufacture and provide suturing equipment that we can be proud of, that you will not find on the Internet, and will not be able to reproduce without spending several hundreds of dollars per student, and we do so without raising our already low price points. bottom line, we believe you deserve to get your money’s worth because we’ve seen the alternative far too frequently.
3. What’s your learning environment?
First off, I get it that in the era of COVID it’s much nicer to not worry about traveling and that online videos are a fantastic opportunity to learn, but whenever possible, your learning environment should mimic the actual practice environment, not your couch.
One of the most important things is active feedback on your skills as you’re developing them, and if you can learn in an environment that is designed for that, you will have the best possible result. This is one of the reasons that at Skills On Point, we have our standalone simulation and training centers set up for your best possible learning environment with multiple high definition TV’s around the room as well as central projectors, low student teacher ratios, and the best possible simulative environment for developing your skill. Hotels are simply not set up for this sort of training, and despite having previously gone multiple times to hotels and conference centers all across the United States, we have decided we needed something better because you deserve better!
Skills On Point Live Courses
These are just a few of the simple reasons why money spent at Skills On Point and the trip to come see our Training Center is always worth it and why our reviews are truly 5 star. If you decide you want to learn more about our courses, check out www.skillsonpoint.com and click on the public courses tab. We offer CME-accredited courses in nearly every commonly privileged procedure performed by any advanced practice provider as well as plenty of courses you can only find here.
Should you decide you want to take training at home rather than traveling to us, we do offer a distance-based solution for nearly all of our live courses with the exception of our acute care skills courses. Anybody who takes our live courses receives access to our online course version with lifetime access just because we want to make sure you have all the resources you need to be successful.
Once you make the trip and see what we are all about, you will understand why there’s simply no comparison to learning from some random video. When it comes down to your patient, your skill, and being truly successful in your discipline, we’ve got you covered.
