Has anyone taken the ecco course from AACN?

[Eirene, ASN, RN]

I was wondering if any of you had taken this course. My employer has me training on it all of next week, I have to get an 80% to pass it.

Anything you can recommend? Has it helped your practice?

Thanks!

[labcat01, BSN, RN]

I'm curious to know what others will say. I'm doing the course right now and I'm finding it tedious and ill-suited for internet use. Basically, you sit there and read text on a computer screen for hours. For the amount of money the hospital pays for it, I would rather they just give us a textbook and a highlighter and let us go at it. It is good information, I just wish there was a better way to deliver it. I have not found that it helps my nursing practice. That's just me though.

Let me know what you think once you get started!

[BGgirl]

I took the class several years ago and it was painful to say the least. It goes above and beyond what you need to actually know. My hospital used to have a class on it before they did it only online which I think might be a little more helpful.

I took notes for the whole thing and then when I was all done found out the nurse educator had printed off notes for us to follow along with. That was very helpful but too late for me to use.

I think it does provide good information and teach you important things, but I'm unsure of how it's really helped my practice any. Good luck.

If you need CE's though, make sure you send in for them. You can get a bunch by taking this class which I neglected to do. One audit later, I'm kicking myself.

[CraigB-RN, MSN, RN]

Like any standardized program, it can be tedious and boring. IT does however add a bit of consistancy to training/education. Were the programs fall apart is intigrating it into a total orientation program.

As to thre being to much information, well that is a mater of perspective. It's geared to cover a wide range of ICU's and practices and as someone who's ego loves knowing more than the residents, I wanted more in some places.

I think it's a good program, but each hospital has to look at it's own cost/benifit ratio to see it's it's worth it.

[NoviceToExpert]

ECCO can be very informative... However, the modules, if you do them carefully, take much longer than specified... My issue with ECCO (aside from typos here and there and the occassional miskeyed answer) is that it is completely non-printer friendly. If you want to print any of the information you have to print screen it rather than print page... in other words, you have to scroll down on the text and reprint the screen shown in order to capture all the text... it wastes a lot of paper and a lot of ink... I found that to get through the modules at my pace it was better to mute the sound and scroll the text and read myself rather than listen to the voiceover... In general I thought it was worthwhile, but feel I could have gotten a lot more out of it in a lot less time if it was formatted differently.

[CC-RN-EMTP]

ECCO has lots of great info. The PAC section is very good. It can be dry and boring at times but IMHO it is worth the effort, especially for the new ICU RN.

CC

[medicrnohio, RN]

I have taken both ECCO and a live critical care class. The ECCO program was very informative, but as other have pointed out, it was also long and tedious. We worked on the program for weeks before we could be on the unit. To me it would have been better to integrate clinical practice with the program. I found the live critical care class to be more my style. We had lectures from different people, got to ask questions, and had hands on work.