Featured BOC Approved Provider: Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters
The BOC regularly features BOC Approved Providers for notable efforts to enhance its continuing education programs for Athletic Trainers (ATs). Featured organizations follow the guidelines set forth by the BOC. Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters Sports Medicine Physical Therapy Educator April Kirkner PT, DPT, ATC shares her organization’s experience.
Why does your organization choose to participate in the BOC Approved Provider Program?
Our organization uses the BOC Approved Provider program to develop and implement quality programs that allow us to provide educational opportunities to our staff, as well as develop a means to network with community practitioners and draw them into our programs.
How have the BOC standards and guidelines for BOC Approved Providers impacted your program development and administrative processes to offer continuing education programs for Athletic Trainers?
The BOC standards and guidelines provide structure that helps me coordinate programs from an administrative perspective, as well as an educational design focus. They help me to work effectively with presenters and educators to develop curriculum and resources to accompany each program making them the highest quality possible. The standards and guidelines assist me in ensuring that our programming objectives and content is at an appropriate learning level and within the athletic training domains.
How do you design your curriculum to help participants improve outcomes for the patients they serve?
Our programming throughout the year is focused on topics under the category of sports medicine for pediatrics and adolescent medicine. Once a program topic is selected, it is designed to ensure that the content helps participants improve knowledge and ability to apply the knowledge, which affects the patients they serve. We measure our participants learning by use of a participant evaluation and assessment.
What advice do you have for organizations looking to be on the cutting edge and maintain compliance, as they develop education programs?
My advice to be on the cutting edge is to select quality topics that your community is interested in learning about and to follow trends that are affecting our practitioners. On our program evaluation, I ask participants to provide us with topics that they would like to see presented. My advice to maintain compliance is to follow the BOC standards and guidelines when setting up your programs.