AAPA, the PA Foundation, and the Graduate Education Foundation (GEF) joined together in March to offer a new CME service for PAs in the military based on the popular lectures on Grand Rounds Online. The program enables PAs in the military to access lectures on-line and earn CME credit.

The program is free to all PAs serving in the military in the United States and overseas and is available at www.CMElectures.org/PAmilitary. It covers 125 lectures on 18 medical and surgical topics. An on-line post-test is given at the end of each lecture, and PAs who successfully pass the test earn a Certificate of Participation.

In addition, a CD that included 70 of the CME lectures was distributed through AAPA's federal service constituent organizations, which had expressed a need for the CME to AAPA.

The GEF, a nonprofit organization based in New Jersey, developed Grand Rounds Online as a postgraduate teaching tool. The interactive multimedia clinical presentations are authored by more than 100 physician educators, most of whom have contributed to the basic text in their specialties.

All lectures are accredited through the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education and Drexel University College of Medicine, here in Philadelphia. The foundation is led by Michael S. Feldman, a practicing cardiologist and professor of medicine at Drexel.

The foundation was established through a $2.5 million grant from the Philadelphia Health Care Trust. Unlike many CME program operators, the foundation operates independently of special interest funding, including pharmaceutical companies or device manufacturers.

Following are excerpts from a letter received in May by AAPA President Mary Ettari about the GEF CME program. AAPA sent Maj. Paul an additional 70 copies of the CME CD in response to her letter.

Dear Mary:
My name is Maj. Winnie Paul. I'm an aviation physician assistant from Honolulu, Hawaii, with the 25th Infantry Division, currently deployed to Iraq. I recently received a free CD-ROM CME disc and loved it! I shared it with some of my junior staff and also passed along the Web site to access more. However, since most of my colleagues are in remote areas, with unreliable Internet access most of the time, the Web site is difficult for most of them to access. And since we are extended, we will be here even longer than our original one-year mission, making getting CME often very difficult. Having the CME disc you sent, with the lectures already on it, would make access to those CME much easier as folk would not have to rely on Internet access to use it. Most of my PA colleagues are the only providers at their location, and to say their conditions are primitive would grossly understate their situation. I estimate 60 or more could be distributed in person or by mail here if I could get access to that many copies...

In early April, I was part of a committee that planned the second ever Deployment PA CME Conference in Baghdad, Iraq... Approximately 50 PAs and a few M.D.s and nurses attended our conference April 4-7. It was a huge success and we received much praise for it but, as you can imagine, being able to fly to a distant location, where often you are the sole provider at most locations, is a luxury most PAs over here could not enjoy. So unfortunately, many of the newer providers, those most ideal for the kinds of CME we offered at the conference, were not able to attend. Therefore, the committee put together the lecture notes of all the speakers and put them on a CD to send to as many folks as we can contact over here. ...

Thank you for your time, and if you have any questions you can reach me by e-mail at winniepaul@hotmail.com or Winnie.paul@us.army.mil. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we complete our mission.

Winnie E. Paul, Major, APA-C, SP, U.S. Army

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