Continuing Education for Healthcare Professionals

CARE plans to offer a course entitled Understanding the Experience of Chronic and Invisible Illness and will potentially be able to make this course available as early as the Fall of 2025. We are currently in the process of obtaining approval so that mental healthcare professionals, including clinical psychologists, clinical licensed counselors, and licensed marriage and family therapists may receive continuing education units for taking this course. We plan to seek approval so that other types of healthcare professionals may receive continuing education units for this course in the future.

Course Summary: The primary purpose of this training is to promote understanding of common experiences of people with complex chronic illness. This includes learning common challenges and misperceptions of this patient group, how those challenges can accumulate and keep a person in a cycle of illness, and ways in which this cycle can be broken.  

Given the vast challenges that these patients experience, we will also explore ways to increase resilience and overall well-being for this population. This will include examining general research on resilience and well-being with discussion of how these tools can be applied for helping this patient group, as well as examining research on resilience conducted specifically with this patient population.

Ultimately, this course serves the purpose of engendering understanding, compassion, and sensitivity for people experiencing complex chronic illness. This course will help to create a compassionate culture within medicine and help to improve services for a currently disadvantaged group. In addition, it will provide practical tools to help improve quality of life, resilience, and overall well-being for these patients.

If you are a healthcare professional interested in this course, please feel free to reach out to us at info@careaboutinvisibleillness.org and we will let you know as soon as it becomes available.

If you would like to provide funding to help us make this course available to more healthcare professionals, please consider a donation that can be made directly on our website. We are so grateful for any amount of support!