What an incredible journey this past year has been for the ARHP. We have made amazing progress in education, collaboration, and chartering the ARHP’s future.
To help you understand what the ARHP leadership and staff are doing on your behalf, I would like to share a few of our accomplishments from the past year.
Achievements in Education
In the area of education, the ARHP had a very successful year. One of this year’s highlights was the extraordinarily successful launching this past December of the NP and PA Postgraduate Rheumatology Training Program. This adult and pediatric online program, consisting of 19 modules, includes 18 hours of audio-annotated PowerPoint slides—over 2,800 slides and 631 images—and was established to meet the need for nurse practitioner (NP) and physician assistant (PA) rheumatology education that was identified through the ACR workforce study and demand from ACR/ARHP members. To date, the program has over 170 registrants, 35 graduates, and very positive evaluation feedback.
A second educational offering with huge success has been the Advanced Practice Skills Training Course. This hands-on training for clinicians was offered to sell-out audiences at the 2008 ACR/ARHP Annual Scientific Meeting and the 2009 ACR State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium, and it will be offered again this year at the 2009 ACR/ARHP Annual Scientific Meeting. For this course, participants learned how to do rheumatologic upper- and lower-musculoskeletal examinations on adult and pediatric patients as well as to apply principles of joint aspirations and injections on shoulder, wrist, finger, foot, and knee joint prosthetics. This course will be offered again at the 2010 ACR State-of-the-Art Symposium in Chicago, so be sure to register before it sells out.