The Challenge of Collecting CEEs

There have been many questions about how to reach the three year 45 CEE minimum, especially if the member lives in a remote area, works part time or has had multiple maternity leaves. Remember that the whole purpose of continuing education is to keep your skills and knowledge current. Even if you are on leave or working part time, you want to be able to assure your employer and your clients that indeed you are up to date and maintaining the highest standards of your professional association. Before panicking, here are some creative suggestions:

• You can count 5 CEE each year in category D just through reading articles. Keep track however of what you have read for auditing. It can be journals or books, but newsletters such as Communique do not count.
  
  
• If you are on a leave, try to find out if there is a Speech or Audio study group in your area (or start one yourself!) and you can count up to 5 CEEs in category C for each year. There must be an educational component, meet regularly and have goal of better service for your clients. You must also keep a record of the dates of the meetings. You could consider developing a chat group via the internet and share information with collegues all over the country! Again, as long as there was an agenda, specific meeting dates and the goals of this category met, it would be acceptable.
  
  
• Contact the Speech department in the local school board to see if you could attend any of the inservices for staff. You could count this under lectures or seminars.
  
  
• Contact ASHA to see if one of their teleconferences could be arranged in your area. This can be counted under category A, with an unlimited total.
  
  
• Sign up to take a computer course, first aid, or stress management course ( you may need it??) that would help in your practice, and which you could count in the related area. You can count 15 CEEs over the three year cycle.
  
  
• Consider doing a special project (category H) for a minimum of 10 CEEs. This could be research in a clinical area that interests you and which will be relevant to your clinical practice. You would have to produce a paper on the topic you researched. You could also decide to follow an individualized CE plan on a topic that interests you and which again would be relevant to your clinical work ( it could be research on the topic, visits to specialized settings related to that topic, observations of clinicans/teachers working with that population etc )
  

• On-line courses are also available. CASLPA has taken initiative in this new learning delivery method and our current course offerings are available here. Another option is www.cnfs.ca (available in French only)