For nurses

Updated Dignity in Pregnancy and Childbirth

⏰  60 minutes (includes required activities)

🏆 1.0 Continuing Education credit available (ANCC)

📜 Certificate of Completion
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What Your Colleagues Say:

"It's very consistent with what I learned about medical errors and cognitive biases, only this time with something I can do about it."

"What I liked most about this course was competence/warmth ratio ..This was something new for me."

"I really liked the examples given were simple and realistic."

"The application of evidence to analyze the problem was new and helpful"

As providers, we strive to provide all our patients the highest quality of care.

Nurses spend more sustained time at the bedside than anyone else on the perinatal team, through long labors, tense triage moments, and the quiet hours of postpartum recovery. That constant presence is exactly why nursing care shapes how safe, respected, and heard every patient feels.

It is also demanding work. Under short staffing, heavy assignments, constant interruptions, and fatigue, the brain leans on fast, automatic shortcuts to get through the shift. A large body of evidence shows those shortcuts, not knowledge or commitment, are a major source of unintended variation in assessment, communication, and follow-through, even among skilled and dedicated nurses.

This 1-hour course translates evidence from neuroscience, cognitive and social science, and clinical communication research into practical tools you can use on your next shift. It focuses on the moments where assessment and communication are most vulnerable to automatic cognitive shortcuts, and gives you in-the-moment techniques that keep judgment steady and communication clear when the unit is busy and the pressure is high.

The result is more consistent care for every perinatal patient, stronger patient trust, and less of the second-guessing and stress that wear nurses down.

What You Gain

A short, practical course built for real shifts, not idealized scenarios.

For Nurses

  • Practical, in-the-moment tools you can use at the bedside right away
  • Steadier assessment and communication when you are short-staffed, interrupted, or stretched thin
  • Communication and advocacy skills that build patient trust and smoother handoffs
  • Techniques that hold up under time pressure, high patient loads, and fatigue
  • Less day-to-day stress and more confidence in your own judgment
  • 1.0 ANCC contact hour and a certificate of completion

For Organizations

  • More consistent perinatal care across nurses, shifts, and units
  • Stronger alignment between quality and safety goals and bedside practice
  • Skills that reinforce the impact of your existing protocols, checklists, and handoff tools
  • Evidence-based content with measurable objectives that support reporting
  • Training that scales across roles and care settings

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

  • Describe common sources of unintended variation in the quality, consistency, and safety of perinatal nursing care.

  • Explain how time pressure, high patient loads, fatigue, and stress increase reliance on automatic cognitive shortcuts, and how those shortcuts can contribute to unintended variation in perinatal assessment, communication, and care.

  • Recognize how rapid first impressions form during a patient encounter and can influence attention, assessment, and communication in ways that were never intended.

  • Apply at least three in-the-moment techniques that interrupt automatic cognitive shortcuts before they affect assessment, care decisions, or communication.

  • Demonstrate communication and advocacy behaviors that strengthen patient partnership, trust, and informed decision-making.

  • Use respectful, individualized communication that reflects how each patient wishes to be identified and addressed.

  • Apply evidence-based tools to deliver consistent, high-quality perinatal nursing care across the full range of patients and clinical situations.

Course Format

Video elearning, job aids, essential reading, and reflective activities. The self-paced format allows you to learn at your convenience.

Who Should Enroll

Nurses: who care for patients during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period, including labor and delivery, mother-baby and postpartum, antepartum, NICU, and OB triage nurses.

For organizations: Well suited to unit-level or system-wide assignment across perinatal nursing teams, with a certificate of completion and measurable objectives for your records.

Why do Optum Health, Mayo Clinic, Boston Scientific, Hospital Association of New York, HealthPartners, Cleveland Clinic, the Permanente Medical Group, Sutter Health, Confluence Health, The Indiana Hospital Association, and the California Health Care Foundation, among others, choose our courses?

In their words:

#unmatched expertise | #the best we have seen | #truly evidence-based  | #top marks from our doctors | #head & shoulders above the rest  

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