The long and the short of CPD

Nowadays, there’s a huge choice of continuing professional development (CPD) for translators. We have one-hour webinars at one end of the scale, and courses with long hours of study, at the other. One-hour sessions inevitably skim the surface of a subject, but they’re useful for introductory purposes or as a refresher. Longer courses are much richer in content, but keeping up with so many hours of study is challenging.

A happy medium

The Alexandria Library has reached a happy medium. It’s running a 14-part webinar series on cardiovascular medicine over the next six months. The course is given by Yana Onikiychuk, and Yana is talking us through heart anatomy and pathology, medical and surgical treatment of heart disease, vascular surgery and transcatheter procedures, broken down into 90-minute webinars. I’ve signed up for the course and attended the first two sessions. The next one, on coronary surgery, is tomorrow (5 May 2015).

Cardiology is one of my specialisms, and I often translate original articles on highly specific heart procedures and conditions. This six-month course offers me the chance to step back to see the whole picture. Unlike Martin Luther King, I need to see the whole staircase to take each step more confidently.

I also hope this course will bring me up to date in a fast-moving field. In the second webinar, Yana talked about renal denervation for resistant hypertension. This procedure was introduced a few years ago with limited success, but it’s an excellent example of a fascinating development in the field of cardiovascular medicine.

I must admit that it’s quite hard to tune in to Yana’s Russian accent. This problem is partly solved by the great range of slides she uses in her presentations. It was easy to deduce that “better ventricular feeling” was actually ventricular filling, as we could see it in the diagram. Some gaps in slide content at the end of the second webinar made this harder.

Free or paid CPD?

Translators not only have a choice of long or short courses, but also of free or paid ones. While there is a great range of free courses for medical translators, I tend to get more out of my CPD when I have to pay for it! The incentive is even greater and I take it more seriously.

That’s why, at €30 a webinar (with a discount if you’re an ITI MedNet member), I thoroughly recommend the Alexandria Library cardiovascular medicine series.

Image attribution: © Zarathustra – Fotolia.com