NRRTS shakes up education: Read article, earn CEUs

LUBBOCK, Texas - NRRTS is giving its registrants one more way to stay up to date on their education.

The organization, starting with the January issue of Directions, a magazine that it publishes bi-monthly, began featuring articles that registrants can read and then take a test on, to earn continuing education units or CEUs.

“It's just another way to give people a different learning method,” said Weesie Walker, executive director of NRRTS. “Watching a webinar is one thing, but to have it in front of you—it's a good way for people to learn things.”

Directions will feature articles on a variety of topics written by a variety of authors. First up in January: “Optimizing Self-Propulsion and Reducing Repetitive Strain Injury” by Lauren Rosen, a physical therapist and ATP/SMS, and the coordinator for the Motion Analysis Center Program at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, Fla.

Walker says this topic will hit home with registrants because manual wheelchairs often get short shrift.

“In my experience, a lot of times you see people in a clinic in a manual wheelchair and nothing has been adjusted and fine tuned in terms of the setup of the chair,” said Walker, also an ATP/SMS. “It's always amazing the difference that little tweaks here and there can make for the user.”

The articles will have decent reach: Directions mails to more than 3,500 industry professionals, including more than 800 rehab technology suppliers nationwide. They will also help to meet a demand: NRRTS registrants must present documentation of 1 CEU (equivalent to 10 contact hours) each year.

NRRTS's education efforts also include a healthy schedule of webinars. At press time in December, it had five webinars scheduled for January and February on topics ranging from applicable ethics to effective advocacy to manual wheelchair configuration.

The new “CEU Article Reviews” follow NRRTS's announcement in October that it has been approved as an accredited provider for the International Association for Continuing Education and Training or IACET, a status that reduces its costs to offer education to registrants.

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“We continue to push to provide quality education that's easy for people to access,” Walker said. hme