Pediatric Learning Solutions: Meeting Your Continuing Education Needs in 2025

As we enter 2025, Children’s Hospital Association’s Pediatric Learning Solutions (PLS) reflects on the achievements, growth, and new innovations made in 2024. Last year, we offered 235 online courses to help meet the needs of educators and learners at 101 hospitals and health systems.

We set new standards and improved our education programs, offered clinicians professional development opportunities, and were recognized for the accomplishments of our dedicated PLS team members. These milestones will serve as inspiration for our work in the coming year and beyond.

Recognizing innovation

PLS won Brandon Hall Group's Gold Technology Excellence Award for App Connect, an innovative mobile solution that provides learners with a personalized companion app experience.

View the infographic.

App Connect gives learners a way to save and access valuable learning content as well as their continuing education (CE) certificates.

“App Connect allows our team to integrate content that’s pertinent to learner’s needs,” said Amy Nelson, vice president of PLS. “It enables a level of personalization and convenience that wasn’t possible on a desktop.”

The mobile app includes 141 job aids, four interactive case studies, access to continuing education certificates, and a new branching scenario for diabetic ketoacidosis.

Continuing education for health care teams

Pediatric health care is constantly evolving, and continuous education helps care teams meet the needs of the pediatric population. PLS offers a wide range of continuing education credits for clinical staff to gain further expertise in children's health. In 2024, clinicians and care providers earned 575,683 CE credits. These credits include:

• 14,034 professional development unit credits.
• 28,252 continuing respiratory care credits.
• 522,203 continuing nursing education credits.
• 11,194 continuing medical education credits.

Learning additions and upgrades

New graduate nurses enter pediatric care settings underprepared, leaving employers with the responsibility of training staff to care for their young patients competently and confidently.

The PLS comprehensive learning program provides evidence-based courseware to prepare nurses for the complexity of caring for pediatric patients. This interactive education includes patient scenarios and tools that promote effective transition to practice.

Courses are developed and regularly updated in collaboration with industry and subject matter experts from children’s hospitals. In 2024, an advisory committee from 13 PLS-participating hospitals helped create new curricula to fill gaps in critical thinking and staff well-being. These resources help educators teach staff to build resiliency and use clinical reasoning and judgment in patient care.

Along with the additions, PLS updated 109 courses in five libraries and one suite:

• Acute Care.
• Behavioral Health.
• Arrhythmia.
• Accreditation and Regulatory.
• Leadership.
• Hematology and Oncology.

Looking ahead

As PLS plans for what is to come in 2025, one thing remains the same: to address needs in pediatric nurse education. Mobile app users can look forward to a user experience upgrade and new interactive job aids. Other goals for 2025 include updating the NICU, PICU, and Hematology/Oncology libraries and forming advisory committees of education specialists to oversee the Acute Care and NICU libraries.

Together, we can provide the education clinicians need to deliver safe and effective pediatric health care.

See demos of the PLS education program.