COULD IT BE SEPSIS? Quality statement 1 of the Australian Sepsis Clinical Care Standard is not a requirement. It is a question — and it has to be asked out loud. A diagnosis of sepsis is considered in any patient with an acute illness or clinical deterioration that may be due to infection. Every other statement in the standard depends on somebody having asked that one first, and the commonest failure in sepsis is not that somebody did not know what to do — it is that nobody said the word.

A fully self-directed, entirely online CPD programme of eleven modules and 8.5 CPD hours, aligned to the ACSQHC Sepsis Clinical Care Standard: its seven quality statements, its eleven indicators, and the NSQHS actions underneath them. No scheduled classes, no live sessions, no clinical placement, no completion deadline.

This programme holds both halves of the antimicrobial timing framework, and most sepsis teaching holds only one. In septic shock and in probable or definite sepsis, antimicrobials go in immediately — ideally within one hour, and within 60 minutes under quality statement 3 when signs of infection-related organ dysfunction are present. In POSSIBLE sepsis without shock, the recommendation is a time-limited course of rapid investigation, with antimicrobials within three hours if concern persists. And where the likelihood of infection is low and there is no shock, the recommendation is to defer while monitoring closely. Which half applies is decided by how certain you are, not by the clock. A course that teaches only urgency produces antimicrobial overuse; one that teaches only stewardship produces hesitation at the bedside of a shocked patient.

Three modules are about recognition, which tells you where the difficulty actually is. Sepsis is a clinical diagnosis and there is no single diagnostic test: lactate is not sufficient for the purpose of diagnosis, a screening tool that does not trigger is not a rule-out, and in older people the commonly recognised signs are often ABSENT — hypothermia, delirium and falls rather than fever. In children, hypotension is not necessary to diagnose septic shock.

Family or carer concern is the first red flag the standard lists. Cases of sepsis have been missed because clinicians did not listen to patients, families or carers, and a systematic review of family-activated escalation found that all calls were deemed appropriate. Your own worry counts too: Action 8.06 names worry or concern in the workforce as an escalation criterion.

What it deliberately does not contain: any antimicrobial agent, dose, route or duration; any fluid volume stated as a prescription; any vasopressor; and any reproduced real case or coronial finding. Empiric therapy comes from the current Therapeutic Guidelines or your locally endorsed guidelines and formulary, chosen for the suspected site, local resistance patterns and the patient's age and weight. Every scenario in the programme is constructed.

Written for registered and enrolled nurses in every setting — emergency, acute wards, aged care, community and remote practice, maternity and paediatrics — plus the managers, educators and clinical leads who own the pathway, and internationally qualified nurses meeting the Australian escalation culture for the first time.

Eleven modules: Orientation · What Sepsis Is · Could It Be Sepsis? · The Patients Who Do Not Look Septic · Lactate, Tools and Clinical Judgement · Time-Critical Management · Antimicrobials: Both Halves of Quality Statement 3 · Listening · Coordination, Handover and Transitions · After Sepsis · The System Around It.

Assessment: a knowledge check after every module with a rationale on every option; a case study assessment of five unfolding situations; and a 60-item summative assessment at 80 per cent with two attempts. Twenty items are mandatory-correct. A certificate is issued automatically on a pass.

Professional development. It authorises nothing: not blood culture collection, not point-of-care lactate testing, not cannulation, and not the administration of anything. Your service's sepsis pathway, its escalation protocol and your own scope of practice override anything in this programme wherever they differ. Content verified 20/09/2026 against the ACSQHC Sepsis Clinical Care Standard (June 2022) and the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines (updated 2026).

A comprehensive, interactive programme across the perinatal continuum — combining Fetal Monitoring and Maternity Crisis Management for midwives and doctors. It builds detailed understanding of fetal surveillance and the structured response to obstetric emergencies, anchored to RANZCOG guidance.

Stream 1 · Fetal Monitoring

1. Fetal physiology
2. Antenatal CTG
3. Intrapartum cardiotocography
4. CTG simulation lab (interactive cases)
5. Cord blood gas
6. Errors & limitations in fetal monitoring
7. Intrapartum intermittent auscultation

Stream 2 · Maternity Crisis Management

1. Shoulder dystocia
2. Breech
3. Postpartum haemorrhage
4. Maternal collapse
5. Pre-eclampsia & eclampsia
6. Uterine rupture
7. Cord presentation & prolapse
8. Antepartum haemorrhage

Medication Administration for Enrolled Nurses

A fully self-directed, entirely online professional development programme. 8.5 CPD hours. Eleven modules. Written for enrolled nurses in every setting - and for the registered nurses who supervise them, and the managers and educators who have to verify their scope.

The sentence the whole programme rests on

You work under the supervision of a registered nurse. You keep responsibility for your own actions. Both are true at once, and the NMBA states them in the same breath - supervision is a requirement placed on the work, not a transfer of accountability.

Which is why 'I was told to' and 'the RN checked it' are not defences, and why the practical rule at the centre of this course is six words long: if it is not right, you do not give it.

Two things to settle before you enrol

• This is not the high-risk medicines course. OBA's High-Risk Medicines: the APINCHS Classification is about which medicines carry disproportionate risk, organised by class. This course is about the act of administration and the scope of one role. The two sit on different actions of the same standard - that course on NSQHS Action 4.15, this one on Action 4.04
• This is not a medicines reference. There is no dose, no strength, no rate, no frequency and no drug-specific clinical information anywhere in it, and there is not going to be. The chart is the order; the Australian Medicines Handbook, the product information and your pharmacist are the references. This is about the process around them

Four layers, and three of them are not on the register

Authority to administer comes from four things at once: your registration and any notation on it, your education and demonstrated competence, your employer's authorisation, and your state or territory's drugs and poisons legislation.

An enrolled nurse may administer medicines unless there is a notation - the notation is the exception, not the rule, and it is removed only by completing the medicines unit within an NMBA-approved Diploma of Nursing and applying to the Board. And intravenous medicines administration requires separate education which is not published on the national register, so no register search can answer it in either direction. That verification is the employer's, under Action 4.04.

What you will be able to do

• State the NMBA position on enrolled nurses and medicines in its own terms - supervision and retained responsibility, together
• Name the four layers of your authority and say where each one is found, including the one nobody can look up
• State what a notation is, what removes it, and what does not
• Explain why the rights of administration are necessary and not sufficient - most errors pass every one of them
• Treat the chart as the order, and identify the chart faults that stop an administration
• Explain what makes a second check independent, and what a check does and does not catch
• Apply 'if it is not right, you do not give it' under pressure from a senior colleague - and complete the escalation and the documentation that must follow it
• Name the documented causes of medication error, and explain why none of them is carelessness
• Document an administration, an omission and a refusal so the record is usable by the next clinician
• Respond to refusal, swallowing difficulty and a PRN request within the EN role
• State what happens after an error, in order - and why concealment is the error that compounds

What is deliberately not in it

• No dose, strength, rate, frequency or concentration for any medicine. You have a chart in front of you, a medicines reference on the ward and a pharmacist on the phone. A number half-remembered from a slide competes with all three and competes badly
• No drug-specific clinical information, and nothing about whether a named medicine may be crushed, opened or altered. That is a pharmacist's determination, made per formulation, and the answer can differ between products containing the same medicine
• No Schedule 8 storage, witnessing, register or discrepancy requirement stated as national, and no rule on verbal or telephone orders or on second checking stated as though it applied everywhere. All of those differ between states, territories and services - a national version would be wrong for most readers and would sound authoritative while being wrong
• No injection, infusion or intravenous technique taught as instruction. Technique is taught practically, supervised, and assessed against a competency. A slide deck cannot credential it and must not appear to

The ten questions you will finish with

This course names the things it will not answer for you, because they are set where you work: whether you have a notation, whether your IV education has ever been verified, whether your scope has ever been defined in writing, which medicines need a second check here, who may be a checker, what your policy says about verbal orders, what you do with a Schedule 8 discrepancy tonight, and three more. The workbook has a page for the actual answers - a number, a name, a form, not 'the escalation process'.

A note on who is taking this course

Some of the people doing this have made a medication error, and some are in a process about one right now. So the programme says plainly that none of the documented causes of medication error is a person being careless, and that the distress after an error is usually out of all proportion to the harm caused. Neither of those is a reassurance written to be kind - they are both findings, and a learner who believes this subject is about blame will not report the next thing.

Support lines appear on every module and in every student document: Nurse & Midwife Support 1800 667 877, free and confidential and answered 24 hours; Lifeline 13 11 14. You may stop at any point and come back - nothing is timed and there is no penalty.

Who it is for

• Enrolled nurses administering medicines in any setting - the cohort this was written for, and the one most often given RN-oriented medication training and left to translate it
• ENs moving between acute, aged care, disability and community, where the authority to administer is the same and almost everything around it changes
• ENs who hold a notation, who need to know precisely what it means and exactly what removes it - this cohort is given wrong information more often than any other
• Diploma of Nursing students approaching HLTENN040, and new graduate ENs in their first year
• Registered nurses who supervise enrolled nurses, and who are frequently unclear about what direct and indirect supervision actually require of them
• Nurse unit managers, educators and aged care clinical leads responsible for verifying scope under Action 4.04 - including the part of it that is not on the register
• Internationally qualified nurses working as ENs, for whom the notation system, the state and territory drugs and poisons framework and the EN-RN relationship are usually entirely new

How you learn

Watch the narrated module video, read the student learner guide, complete the reflective workbook activity, then complete the knowledge check and read every rationale - including on the items you answered correctly. There are no scheduled classes, no live sessions, no clinical placement, and no time limit on anything.

What is included

• Eleven module slide decks and eleven student learner guides
• Eleven knowledge checks with a rationale on every option, right and wrong
• A case study assessment - five unfolding situations across 25 branching decisions
• A 60-item summative assessment blueprinted across all eleven modules, 80 per cent to pass, with 20 mandatory-correct items
• A fillable reflective workbook - your CPD evidence, which the NMBA expects you to hold
• Five optional interactive practice tools: can I give this, stop or go, what went wrong here, write the entry, and a scope of practice self-check
• Three fillable workplace instruments: a scope of practice self-audit, a medication round walk-through, and a near-miss and error review
• A one-page scope of practice card, and a directory of Australian organisations

A note on the CPD figure

8.5 hours, and it is measured rather than asserted: narration at 135 words per minute, reading at 130, knowledge checks timed to include every rationale, and the assessments timed as measured reading plus a stated decision allowance. The measured total is 8.65 hours, which is 8.5 to the nearest half hour - rounded down rather than up. It has not been padded to reach a rounder number, because the whole point of deriving the figure is that it is not chosen.

Sources, retrieved 19/09/2026. Enrolled nurse scope and the notation: NMBA Fact sheet - Enrolled nurses and medicines administration, version 3.1 approved July 2023, next review due May 2027. Supervision and retained responsibility: NMBA Fact sheet - Enrolled nurse standards for practice, version 3.0 approved March 2023 (its stated next review date of February 2025 has passed; it remains the current published fact sheet), and the NMBA Enrolled nurse standards for practice, commenced January 2016. Medication safety: NSQHS Standards second edition - Medication Safety Standard, 15 actions across four criteria, in particular Actions 4.04, 4.09 and 4.14. Charts: ACSQHC National Inpatient Medication Chart family. Not stated in this course, because they belong to a prescriber, a pharmacist, a legislature or your workplace: any dose, strength, rate or frequency; any drug-specific clinical information; whether a named medicine may be altered; your jurisdiction's Schedule 8 and verbal order requirements; and your service's second-checking policy. Review due 19/09/2027.

Palliative and End-of-Life Care

A fully self-directed, entirely online professional development programme for nurses, care workers, student nurses and family carers. 10 CPD hours.

Who should enrol

·       Registered nurses (RNs) and enrolled nurses (ENs) in acute, aged, disability and community settings

·       Internationally qualified nurses preparing for Australian practice

·       Assistants in nursing, personal care workers and disability support workers

·       Student nurses and student enrolled nurses

·       Family members and informal carers supporting someone who is dying at home

What you will cover

How you will learn

1.     Watch the narrated module video.

2.     Read the Student Learner Guide for that module.

3.     Complete the reflective workbook activity.

4.     Complete the knowledge check and read the rationales.

5.     Move to the next module when the system unlocks it.

What this course is, and is not

NCLEX-RN (NGN) Preparation Programme

Purpose

This programme prepares internationally qualified nurses to sit the NCLEX-RN multiple-choice examination as part of the NMBA Outcomes-Based Assessment pathway to registration in Australia. It covers the whole of the NCLEX-RN Test Plan, teaches the Next Generation item types and the clinical judgment model they are built on, and bridges Australian clinical terminology to the wording candidates will meet on the examination.

Who it is for

• Internationally qualified registered nurses streamed to the Outcomes-Based Assessment
• Candidates repeating the examination after an unsuccessful attempt
• Australian-educated nurses seeking NCLEX-RN registration for practice overseas
• Educators delivering NCLEX preparation under an OBA partnership arrangement

At a glance

How it is built

Modules are numbered by content area but taught in a sequence set by dependency and examination weighting. Foundations come first - exam mechanics, safety, management of care, laboratory values and calculation - because every other module rests on them. Pharmacology is taught as a block and then revisited daily for the remainder of the programme, because pharmacology decays quickly and does not hold to test day if studied once. Body systems follow, then the specialty content candidates most often under-prepare mental health, paediatrics, maternity and health promotion. Clinical skills and consolidation close the programme.

Practice items are distributed to match the published Test Plan bands rather than spread evenly, so study effort concentrates where the examination concentrates.

What accompanies every lecture

A slide deck, a facilitator guide, a student workbook with study notes and case work, a cold item set with full rationales, a terminology bridge from Australian usage to NCLEX wording, and one NGN item type modelled through an unfolding case.

Assessment and readiness

Lecture item sets are diagnostic and carry no pass mark. Module quizzes are timed and set at 65% on a cold first attempt. Progress Examination 1 covers Modules 00–09 and Progress Examination 2 covers Modules 10–19, each 75 items, timed and Test Plan weighted, requiring 65% overall with no client need category below 60%. The mock examination is 85 items in a single uninterrupted sitting.

A test date is recommended only once every module quiz is cleared cold, both progress examinations are cleared with no category below 60%, one mock is completed without pausing, and the candidate's item log shows a shift away from knowledge-gap errors toward isolated reading errors.

Learning outcomes

On completion, candidates can:

1. Explain how computer adaptive testing determines the result, and interpret the pass standard correctly
2. Identify each Next Generation item type on sight and apply the correct answering strategy
3. Apply the six steps of the NCSBN Clinical Judgment Measurement Model to an unfolding clinical case
4. Apply a defensible priority framework to select the first nursing action in any clinical situation
5. Demonstrate safe medication practice, including calculation, high-alert medications and toxicity recognition
6. Recognise clinical deterioration early and escalate using a structured communication tool
7. Apply the legal, ethical and professional principles governing delegation, consent, documentation and advocacy
8. Translate Australian clinical terminology, units and drug names into the wording used on the examination
9. Deliver safe, culturally responsive care across the lifespan, including mental health, paediatric and maternity content
10. Use progress-exam and item-log data to construct and act on an individual remediation plan

Regulatory currency statement. NCSBN revises the NCLEX-RN Test Plan on a triennial cycle, and the passing standard, item counts, appointment length and fees are set by NCSBN and Pearson VUE. NMBA and AHPRA set the Internationally Qualified Nurse and Midwife pathway, its streaming rules, fees and validity periods. Every figure of this kind must be verified against the source document in force at the candidate's test date before it is quoted to a candidate. OBA educators do not advise on individual streaming, visa or eligibility decisions.

OBA Nursing Academy is an education-only provider. We do not guarantee exam results, registration, employment, migration or visa outcomes.

OBA Nursing Academy · ABN 38 015 879 575 · Currumbin QLD · obana.com.au