November Instructor Newsletter

It’s Movember! Spotlighting Men’s Health – prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health. November is also Epilepsy Awareness Month, Lung Cancer Awareness Month, National COPD Month, and National Diabetes Month. Please reach out to those you know and teach that need to know more about how to stay healthy and safe.

I hope everyone had a healthy and safe Thanksgiving!

I sent out the last few newsletters from email, and had a lot of them bounce back. I think it is an issue with my webhost, so I am going to try using MailChimp to see if I have better success with everyone receiving this.

Last month I wrote about the changes to Heartsaver First Aid CPR AED Online. The blended learning class has been divided into 2 courses – Heartsaver First Aid CPR AED Basic and Heartsaver First Aid CPR AED Total.

Basic is the original course – Adult CPR AED is required as is about half of the first aid content, the rest, including child CPR AED and infant CPR is optional. Total requires Adult CPR AED and ALL first aid topics, Child and Infant CPR AED are still optional.

If you provide these course links or are unsure about which option to use please email me. I’m happy to explain these in further detail.

For in-person classroom courses – please, please, please check off the appropriate boxes on page 1 and page 3 of the Heartsaver roster form. This helps me to know how to issue your eCards correctly. If I’m unsure, I’ll be contacting you before issuing the eCards. It is faster and easier for me to check with you than it is for me to edit the eCards if there is a mistake.

We’ve set up a Site License for Safe Sitter. This program includes 3 different babysitting program outlines as well as a Safe at Home program for younger children. If you are interested in teaching these programs please let us know. There is an online training through Safe Sitter that you must complete. If you are near our Hampton, NH Training Center you can sign out the instructor materials and activities kit. Otherwise you would need to purchase your own activities and instructor materials.

Change in Training Center Fees

As we’ve grown our expenses and how we fund those has changed. Don’t worry, the costs to everyone has gone down.

The annual instructor fee will end at the end of 2022. Going forward we will charge 1 fee during the Instructor Renewal. Instructors who belong to one of our Training Sites will pay any fees to their Training Site and should check with them as to any fees that they may require.

Our fee structure includes:

• Instructor renewal fee – this covers course monitoring, your instructor card, and your provider card if you need a separate provider card and is assessed every 2 years when you renew your instructor card.
• Instructor transfer fee – this is the cost for instructors who are transferring into our Training Center either directly or through a Training Site. This fee covers the cost of course monitoring, instructor and provider card costs, and admin time to process the paperwork involved.
• Secondary alignment fee – this is the cost for instructors who are adding us as a secondary alignment into our Training Center either directly or through a Training Site. This fee covers the cost of course monitoring if needed, and admin time to process the paperwork involved.
• eCard fee – this is the cost to purchase eCards and issue them to your students. Part of this fee covers the cost of the insurance the Training Center is required to carry. If you belong to a Training Site or eCard Location, your rosters will go to them and they will be charging you for your eCards.
• Equipment rental or classroom rental fees – would be for any instructor who wants to rent equipment or the Training Center classroom for their classes.

Since the costs are different if you are aligned under the Training Center or through a Training Site, there will be separate emails in a few days with these costs. If you are aligned with Coastal CPR & First Aid through a Training Site, please contact your Training Site for any questions about charges and fees.

AHA ECC Beat

I have been forwarding the AHA Newsletter ECC Beat to everyone. If you have not received this please let me know. Links to AHA webinars are posted in each ECC Beat newsletter. The ECC Beat is also linked in the AHA Instructor Network.

Instructor Development

Every month, or every other month, I have provided an instructor development session. This has been a mix of in-person and on Zoom. Beginning in January I will be starting a series of instructor trainings – in-person and on Zoom – on instructing as a small business. These will be on Monday nights from 6:15-7:30 pm EST, both in-person at our Training Center at 861 Lafayette Rd #7, Hampton, NH and on Zoom for anyone who is not local or cannot attend in person. The schedule for these session has not been set up yet, but will be either weekly or biweek. These sessions will cover business structure, websites, online registration systems, where to hold classes, marketing, SCORE/SBA services, equipment needs, places to purchase equipment, AHA’s Training Central, teaching other programs, sub-contracting, and more. I am looking for Training Center Faculty and Instructors to help facilitate these sessions. Are you an active instructor who might have some tips to share? Do you have a website and online registration system and info that could help someone starting out?

Later in 2023 I’d like to start a Best Practices series with experienced instructors sharing some of their classroom tips.

If you can help out, or have ideas or questions on these trainings please contact me at gail@coastalcpr.com so we can get this all in place to help everyone out!

I will have details more firmed up and posted in the December Instructor Newsletter.

Can you issue your own eCards?

If you teach frequently we will set you up to issue your own eCards. This is for instructors who teach 6 or more classes annually. We will meet (in-person or Zoom) to go over how to do this. Instructors who issue their own eCards still must submit all their rosters as we are required by the AHA PAM to hold a copy of your rosters for a minimum of 3 years. If you prefer us to issue them to your students we will continue to do so.

We can help you teach other programs as well.

In addition to our AHA programs, we are also an American Red Cross Licensed Training Provider and a Health and Safety Institute Training Center. If you are interested in teaching other programs please let us know. We can add you to our ARC LTP agreement or HSI Training Center.

Instructor courses

Do you know someone who would like to become an instructor? Our last instructor courses for this year are BLS Instructor on December 5th and Heartsaver Instructor on December 6th. We are also hiring! I am actively looking for instructors to teach regularly at the Training Center in Hampton. If you are interested please let me know,

Do you have questions that we have not answered? What can we help you with to support you as an instructor? Please let us know! Without your feedback we can only guess at what you may need from us as your AHA Training Center.