Continuing Education for Healthcare Professionals

CARE's President Julie Stankiewicz has begun a collaboration with Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology, Office of Professional Development and Continuing Education. She will be offering her groundbreaking course, Understanding the Experience of Chronic and Invisible Illness, through their online platform. Clinical psychologists will be able to receive continuing education units for completion of the program. She is currently seeking approval so that physicians, nurses, and social workers may also receive continuing education units for completing this course. 

Exciting Update: Once the course becomes available, anyone can take it! Although only clinical psychologists can currently earn CE credits, the course is open to all individuals - students, professionals, caregivers, policymakers, and others - who want to learn about the lived experience of chronic and invisible illness.

Course Summary:   

This course offers a comprehensive understanding of what it means to live with complex chronic illnesses — conditions such as ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and long COVID, whose symptoms are often severe yet unseen by others. The material thoroughly explores common challenges these patients face — including dismissal by medical practitioners, medical trauma, barriers to disability benefits (SSDI), employment discrimination, disbelief from family and friends, and loneliness. The curriculum examines how these challenges accumulate to keep a person trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of illness — and reveals how that cycle can be broken. Along the way, it contrasts conventional medical approaches with functional and integrative models of care, and highlights the qualities of care that best support healing.

Given the significant stressors of living with complex chronic illness, this course also provides practical, evidence-based tools to build resilience and overall well-being — including self-care practices such as nutrition and physical exercise, and psychological strategies such as mindfulness and gratitude. Special considerations for supporting children and adolescents are included. The program concludes by providing interviews with individuals who have experienced complex chronic illness and relevant professionals — bringing the research to life.

This training aims to foster understanding, compassion, and sensitivity toward people with complex chronic illnesses. Designed for healthcare professionals and students, it offers a path toward a more compassionate culture of care, and provides numerous strategies to improve quality of life, resilience, and well-being for a currently underserved patient population.

If you are interested in taking this course, please reach out to us at info@careaboutinvisibleillness.org.

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.