We are so happy to see 2020 go and to start 2021!
Advanced Health Education Center was tossed by the COVID-19 whirlwinds and made many changes to adjust to the new reality. We reduced our live event training in March and closed our classrooms to only broadcasting in April. We moved training to streaming over the internet for all clients while we concentrated on assisting our staffing division find, recruit, and employ health professionals who were experiencing lock-down unemployment.
The AHEC/MRS team stepped up and were working 7 days/week until the testing centers were staffed and all the other ancillary requirements for screeners and nurses were stable. MEDRelief saw over 500 employees placed to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic, and they worked a grand total of 211, 823 hours over the entire year. If these professionals were working back-to-back shifts, it would take them 24 years to cover that time! Now we are working on staffing needs for the vaccine centers in addition to other needs for overwhelmed facilities. Radiology staffing is back as outpatient and breast centers have begun doing routine patient examinations. What we found as we opened the regular staffing is that there are shortages because of COVID-19, burnout, and retirement. Some folks just got the heck out.
The end of any year brings the look-back at what was accomplished during the year. The AHEC group led the way by responding to the individuals who required continuing professional education and those physicians who needed to add a new skill or refresh an existing skill. AHEC did not stop educating but had to achieve educational goals in new ways. Even during this pandemic, AHEC managed to broadcast a whopping 11,680 hours of CE over the course of 2020. When we did open our doors in July with strict safety protocols in place, we had 35 physicians come for private tutorials, and we still managed to teach 3,520 hours, face to (socially distanced) face. And for our self-paced professionals, we provided a total 3,440 hours of home study continuing education activities.
During this crazy year we also managed to keep our community informed with our blog. We had 17,853 viewers from across 127 countries! Our blog was most popular outside of the United States in the UK, Canada, and India, respectively. The top 3 most popular blog posts were:
Patient Safety: Whose Job Is It Anyway? A Radiology Tragedy
Am I Going to Get the Coronavirus?
Radiology Community Shares Coronavirus Clinical Practices
We could not be prouder of our healthcare heroes and our AHEC/MRS team and everything they did (and continue to do) for our communities during 2020. We are looking head on into 2021 and can not wait to see how this new year wraps up!
