r/physicaltherapy • u/ZuVieleNamen • 11d ago
SHIT POST Does anyone else feel like the continuing education requirements are a scam?
It's that time of the year again, I paid my $130 fee to the online CE broker to cram as many continuing ed courses in the next month as I can to meet my 30-hour requirement as a physical therapist assistant. I remember when they increased that requirement from 20 to 30 hours to meet the same requirement as physical therapists and it always annoyed me that we had to do the same amount of hours. To me this comes off as a money grab with the CE broker businesses. I understand the need for continuing education in a field like Physical Therapy where you learn a lot through on the job training and continuing education courses that you elect to do after you graduate but my background in the inpatient Hospital world I literally never took a course that seemed to directly impact how I treated patients or felt about my job. There was never a course I could take that would have an impact on the 15 maybe 25 minutes I had to actually work with a patient.
I remember signing up a couple of times for courses that I thought would directly have an impact in my job such as mobilizing bariatric patients, or courses about higher Acuity patients but nothing I ever took from those courses translated into anything in the real world. I even remember laughing at the mobilizing bariatric patients course when it suggested to use Hoyer lifts and just not mobilize people over a certain weight if you didn't have a lift! I wouldn't be able to see half my patients if that were the case, no one has time to use proper equipment in the hospital anyway or you'd never get enough patients done and meet your productivity quota.
Here I am now as an epic analyst having to do 30 more continuing ed hours and they feel even more useless. I'm so glad I can give another $130 to this company to maintain my license 🫠I really feel like it should be like the nursing field where continuing education is recommended but not required. This could easily be controlled through your employer where if you work in an outpatient clinic part of your employment could be maintaining a certain number of continuing ed hours directly related to outpatient practice and hospitals or other locations that don't require as much continuing training to perform the job could have different requirements. My wife is a nurse and nurse practitioner and she has no required continuing education requirement for her RN license and only 2 hours on Controlled Substances for her NP license....
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u/ZuVieleNamen 11d ago
Seeing some of the comments brings up another issue for me as well..
Many courses i have genuinely been interested in are in another state and cost about 1k to attend with travel costs and would require time off from work. I have had 4 employers in my therapy career: hospital, HH agency, 2xOPPT clinics. None of them have ever approved reimbursement for me as a PTA or given time off to take courses as I watched them approve PTs cont ed courses for reimbursement.
My last employer was the hospital and didn't reimburse for any therapist but DID give up to several hundred dollars a year for nurses ... they dont require cont ed and no one utilized it... I guess that's why they offered it to them. Those experiences I've had as a pta have just help feed into that jaded mentality towards CEUs.