13 Best MedBridge Rehab Continuing Education Courses

Are you an OT practitioner new to inpatient rehab? And are you looking for quality continuing education courses? I want to share the 13 best MedBridge Rehab Continuing Education courses to help you feel confident in the inpatient rehab setting. These courses are perfect for inpatient rehab occupational therapists and COTAs, and they’re created to help you flourish. In addition to these courses, there are MANY more applicable rehab courses on Medbridge with more coming out regularly. I will be sure to create a follow-up post of even more great MedBridge rehab courses in the future. If you do not already use MedBridge, get a $175 discount by using this link or the promo code MYOTSPOT.

13 MedBridge Courses To Help You In Your Rehab Practice

1. Spinal Cord Injury Overview

If you’re new to working with patients affected by spinal cord injury, this is a great introductory course to help you get started working with this population. The course covers demographic and financial implications associated with SCI, major medical complications, and how to assist patients/families with limiting and/or preventing some of the long term negative health complications. The course also covers the International Standards for the Neurologic Classification of spinal cord injury and the impact location of injury and severity of injury have on predicting outcomes after SCI.  

2. Comprehensive Intervention Strategies for Patients with Spinal Cord Injuries

In addition to the previous course, this spinal cord injury course is another great addition to provide you with intervention strategies when working with this diagnosis. As the course states, finding the optimal intervention strategies for patients with spinal cord injury can be very challenging due to the differences in the levels of injuries. The course dives into functional outcomes for each level of injury along with common complications, causes of shoulder pain and prevention interventions. You’ll also learn strategies for optimal movement for the different level injuries, and upper extremity exercise prescription. I also found it very helpful that the course features early rehab considerations of SCI and actual demonstrations of interventions and strategies with real patients that have both cervical and thoracic level injuries.

3. Stroke Recovery Models: Addressing Stroke Survivor and Caregiver Needs

In inpatient rehab, patients affected by stroke are also a common and complex patient population. Because of this, I wanted to include several stroke continuing education courses. This first course is a really nice comprehensive course that covers the impact of stroke on the patient and their caregivers, along with evidence-based models of stroke recovery, and strategies for assessing and addressing the needs of the patient and their family caregivers. This also includes the post-rehab discharge needs and complications that the patient and their caregivers can face.

4. Functional Treatment Ideas and Strategies in Adult Hemiplegia (Parts A and B)

These are actually two separate courses  taught by Jan Davis and are meant to be taken together, so I combined them into one section. Definitely take them both! If you didn’t already know, Jan Davis is an OT extraordinaire and the queen of functional treatments. These two courses are specifically tailored to functional interventions for patient affected by stroke. A bit more from the course descriptions: “Jan Davis skillfully combines Motor Learning Theory with handling methods designed to improve upper and lower extremity function with actual stroke survivors. She uses functional activities taken from real-life and makes complex principles easy to understand. In Part A, you will follow four stroke survivors as their key problem areas and treatment goals are identified and treatment begins. In Part B, Jan skillfully demonstrates how to select and use functional activities, taken from real-life, to improve upper and lower extremity function with stroke survivors.  This course is a ‘must have’ for occupational therapists, physical therapists, and assistants working in stroke rehabilitation.”

5. The Hemiplegic Shoulder: Practical Assessment and Intervention Strategies

Working with a hemiplegic shoulder requires quite a bit more knowledge than what most of us learned in school, so this course was also really helpful for me when I started in inpatient rehab. Many patients affected by stroke will present with this, so it’s best to really have a solid course to educate you on this beforehand. This course covers not only the biomechanics of the hemiplegic shoulder but it will also help you develop problem-solving skills to appropriately evaluate and develop appropriate interventions for your patients. The course includes multiple demonstrations, intervention ideas and info about high and low tone, subluxation, pain, and functional activities.

6. Brain Injury: Epidemiology, Pathophysiology, Etiology and Levels

In addition to spinal cord injuries and strokes, patients affected by brain injuries are also common in inpatient rehab and are a complex population to work with if you’re a new practitioner. This course is a great introduction and medical overview about brain injury epidemiology, causes, mechanisms, the pathophysiology and the classification of brain injury severity.

7. Acute Brain Injury and Disorders of Consciousness: Assessment and Intervention

Along with the previous overview of brain injury, this course will help you when working with patients affected by brain injury. It discusses patient management at the early stages following brain injury and for people in the disorders of consciousness phase of recovery. In addition, you’ll learn about common complications, outcome measures and interventions. Actual patients are shown in case studies to provide examples of many of the common issues experienced after brain injury.

8. Understanding Lower Extremity Limb Loss

In school, patients post-amputation aren’t always thoroughly discussed, and I did not have the chance to work with anyone in this population in fieldwork. I found that in my practice, I was seeing people post-amputation without really knowing much about it and just “winging it.” I was really glad to find this course (one in a series of eight courses on amputations) that covered the medical background of amputations. This particular course includes reasons for amputation, level of amputations and surgical procedures, elective amputation considerations, neurological implications, wound healing, nutrition and wound management, and patient education. It’s definitely a series worth taking if you ever work with this population.

9. Safe Patient Handling for Therapists

The title says it all; this one is a must for new OTs and COTAs in inpatient rehab since the job involves so much patient handling when working on transfers. This course will explore the risks associated with patient transfers and handling along with strategies and technologies to promote safe patient handling. It also emphasizes the importance of a culture of safety when integrating the concepts of safe patient handling/mobility.

10. Practical Strategies for Working with Cognitively Impaired Individuals

This is a really interesting course (in a series of five parts) taught by Dr. Rob Winningham, a human memory researcher who specializes in older adults. This course teaches strategies and interventions designed to enhance some patients’ abilities to encode new declarative memories with both short-term strategies that can be used without cognitive rehabilitation along with longer-term interventions. The course also addresses ways to overcome the possible challenge of creating interventions that yield improvements that generalize beyond the specific task or exercise done in the clinic. The strategies learned in the course may help improve carryover with patients that are cognitively impaired.

11. Current Concepts in Joint Replacement

For your orthopedic rehab patients, this course (one of four in an orthopedic series) provides a great overview including current trends in joint replacement, information about the aging population and arthritis, outcomes assessments and post-op exercises. This course uses patient demonstrations and videos that also help to increase successful patient outcomes post-orthopedic surgery.

12. Aging Overview: Facts, Theories, and Numbers

This course on aging is one my favorites for any adult-based OT practitioner, but is also especially helpful for the inpatient rehab OT, as much of the rehab population consists of older adults. The course presents an overview of aging and includes several theories of aging including biological and social, along with medical models of geriatric care. In addition, a review of systems covers the effects of aging, aging skin, digestive, and sensory systems in addition to a review of joints, circulatory systems, and pulmonary systems in older adults.

13. Mindfulness to Cultivate Empathy, Resilience, & Therapeutic Presence

Lastly, I wanted to add this course for you as a practitioner. Inpatient rehab (and many other occupational therapy settings) can be a very challenging and exhausting job when doing it full time. Because of this, I wanted to add this course to help you as a clinician feel the best you can and to help avoid the occasional feelings of burnout one can face. Per the course description, “Significant evidence suggests that mindfulness based strategies are effective tools for empowering healthcare providers in the compassionate care of the patients they are called to serve.” This course “uses mindfulness based tools for promoting empathy, supporting resilience, and enhancing therapeutic presence among health care providers. Suggestions for the development of both formal and informal mindfulness based practices will be provided.” Chapters include “The Problem of Stress, Harnessing Positive Neuroplasticity, An Overview of Mindfulness,  Mindfulness Practices, The Neurophysiology of Mindfulness, and Strategies for Empathic Communication.”

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These are my personal favorite MedBridge rehab courses, but I’d also love to know, if you’re using MedBridge, what have YOUR favorite courses been? Please share them in the comments below! Looking forward to adding more to the roster 🙂

Disclosure: After personally using (and loving) MedBridge Continuing Education, I reached out to become a MedBridge affiliate. All information in this post was initiated and written by me, and all opinions about these MedBridge Continuing Education courses are my own.