BrightStar Care Partners with Adtalem on Clinical Training in Hospice, Palliative Care

Want to read more palliative care-focused content like this? Subscribe to Palliative Care News today!

BrightStar Care is partnering with the medical and nursing training organization Adtalem Global Education to help build up their hospice, home health and palliative care workforce.

Amid staffing shortages, limited access to clinical training continues to place constraints on recruitment and retention. The BrightStar Care-Adtalem partnership will give nurses a 16-week training module that ranges through a number of specialties, including home-based care.

“Nurses in our bachelor’s in nursing program are educated as generalists, but that causes a little bit of a problem when you are figuring out where you want to work,” Adtalem executive Dr. Karen Cox told Hospice News. “There are areas that students really don’t see in an organized way at a predictable level, and those are perioperative care and home care.”

Cox is also president of Chamberlain University, which along with Walden University develops much of the curriculum for the program. Adtalem is the parent company of Chamberlain, Walden, the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, Ross University School of Medicine and Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine.

The program is supported through a $1 million grant from the American Nurses Foundation. Nursing students toward the end of their curriculum in good standing are eligible to participate in this training at no charge, according to Cox. If they pass, they can carry out their last 96 hours of training at a partner organization like BrightStar Care.

Among the advantages for those provider partners is that these trained nurses are easier to onboard and they tend to stay with their employers for more than a year, Cox said.

“We cast a pretty wide net and talked to a number of home-based care organizations to see if they thought this program makes sense or whether they already had the education material that we need to put this course together,” Cox said. “BrightStar Care was the first one to say they’ll do it. The course is co-branded by BrightStar Care and Chamberlain, but it’s open to anybody. So we have students taking it who end up going to any of these other home care companies that are participating. It’s designed to raise all boats in the profession and a specialty.”