As hospitals and ASCs work to minimize their costs, staff education is often one of the first items trimmed or slashed from the budget. These cost savings can cut deep, however. Employees miss out on the opportunity to sharpen their skills. And you miss out on the chance to forge loyalty to your facility. With that as a backdrop, here are five ways to get the most bang for your staff-education buck.

Address professionally certified employees first
With only so many education dollars to go around, your first priority needs to go to RNs who are required to maintain a certain number of continuing-education credits and contact hours to renew their licenses. Certifications such as CNOR and CAPA also require hours and, in some cases, specific types of contact hours are required for re-certification without taking an examination.

Next, you should look to help your non-professional employees who also have board certification requirements, such as your surgical and radiological technologists. Lastly, your other employees need and deserve updates in their practice, refreshers in their customer service skills and opportunities to network with their peers.

The good news is that you can accomplish this with minimal disruption to the staffing schedule. Employees who have gone through the certification process already know that giving up weekends and evenings to attend in-service and educational meetings is often part of the deal. But how do you provide all of this on a shoestring? In a word, creativity.

Take advantage of inexpensive professional meetings
One great way to provide educational opportunities to your staff without spending a lot of money is to send staff to monthly professional meetings, local seminars and meetings offered by local universities. For example, AORN holds monthly meetings in most areas of the country that offer one contact hour each for assorted topics related to perioperative services. ASPAN and surgical tech associations do the same.

These organizations also sponsor inexpensive regional seminars, usually held on Saturdays (or Friday evening and Saturday), which offer up to eight contact hours. Seminar registration rates are often less than $100 and you may even be able to get in on hotel discounts. For example, we paid less than $200 per nurse ($85 to $95 for registration and $84 per night at the hotel) for a recent nursing seminar held in Asheville, N.C.

Meetings offered by local universities are an even bigger bargain. For example, Clemson University offers an ambulatory surgery meeting every May. Not only is the registration less than $100, but my staff can drive home after the meeting, so hotel rates are a non-issue.

Browse online and examine journals
Another budget-conscious way to provide staff education is to explore the array of online courses for CEUs available through professional organizations such as AORN, certification boards and even through some vendor Web sites. You can also obtain CD-ROMs for credit distributed by exhibitors at national meetings. Similarly, professional journals and magazines often have materials approved for continuing education credits. Lastly, be on the lookout for educational phone and/or Web conferences sponsored by organizations such as AAASC and FASA.

Seek help from sales reps
Most major vendors and medical device manufacturers have clinical educators on staff that do nothing but travel to facilities to train end-users on site in the use of their products. Contact your local reps to inquire about the availability and cost of these services; often, you can negotiate to get educational services folded in to your purchase agreement. This is a great way to conveniently obtain CEUs for all of your staff.

Save your dollars for national meetings
National and accreditation meetings are an expensive proposition between registration, travel and lodging costs, but you gain a lot for the investment. There is truly something for everyone at the big meetings - from practice management seminars for administrators to materials management to accreditation preparation - and there are continuing-education opportunities galore for your staff.

Getting funding for these meetings is not always an easy sell to facility owners, although it tends to be easier to accomplish in the ASC environment than in the hospital (less bureaucracy, more access to money and to owners). When you approach the owners, stress these long-lasting benefits rather than the costs:

• attendees come back excited about what they do, eager to implement their new learning into their practice; and
• paying an employee's way fosters staff loyalty to the center.

Don't neglect your own education
If you encourage your staff to give up their nights and weekends to go to meetings and seminars, you'd better go to your fair share, too. You may occasionally want to step aside if only one person can go to an expenses-paid, out-of-town meeting and you stand in the way of a deserving employee who usually must pay her own way or stick to the local meetings and freebies.