Perinatal Continuing Education Program (PCEP):
Improving Care for Pregnant Women and Newborns

PCEP is an educational program for physicians, nurses, nurse midwives and practitioners, respiratory therapists, and all others who care for pregnant women or newborn babies. It has a nearly 30-year history of providing practical, useful, cost-effective perinatal education to hospital-based care providers.

PCEP (pronounced either P-C-E-P or P-CEP) is a comprehensive educational program designed to be offered as outreach education by regional medical centers to participating hospitals in their geographic regions or network of affiliated hospitals. In addition, regional medical centers often use PCEP within their own institutions.

More than 150,000 nurses, physicians, and other perinatal care providers in the United States and overseas U. S. military hospitals have participated in the Perinatal Continuing Education Program. The program has also been used in Canada, Bosnia, Poland, Mexico, and China. In addition, PCEP served as the model for a program developed in South Africa.

This is the website to use to learn about PCEP. This website describes the program and its components, lists published implementation results, gives implementation timelines, and discusses domestic and international use.

Study of the PCEP books is just one component of the complete educational program. With use of the PCEP Implementation Manual CD-ROM, any hospital can implement all components of the Perinatal Continuing Education Program.

Useful

• Encourages multi-disciplinary, multi-specialty participation.
• Includes self-instructional materials with broad perinatal content.
• Helps hospitals determine perinatal care goals, resources, and care routines.
• Provides hospital risk-reduction tools.
• Provides nursing skill competency evaluation tools.
• Teaches both manual skills and cognitive knowledge.
• Is economical of time and money for both participants and implementers.
• Has continuing education credit available to all participants.

Current

Program and book content have been revised many times over the years. Frequent updating has been a hallmark of PCEP materials for decades.

Effective

PCEP has been extensively evaluated, both by the developers and by others. Results are documented in numerous peer-reviewed publications.

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