Most providers’ clinical training doesn’t prepare them to provide high-quality care to people with complex health and social needs.

As policies and requirements for addressing social determinants of health and health equity become more common in communities across the US, this gap in training puts them at a disadvantage.

The Complex Care Certificate is an online, self-paced curriculum that gives frontline providers of all disciplines — community health workers, social workers, nurses, physicians, case managers, and more — a solid foundation in providing person-centered, team-based care.

The Complex Care Certificate provides a common framework and shared language for interprofessional teams. It gives team members the tools they need to support the individuals they serve in meeting their own goals for improved health and well-being. And it builds teams’ capacities to address the social needs that impact patients’ health but that have long been thought of as outside the realm of healthcare.

By anchoring to real-world examples, learners become immersed in the realities of complex care work and practice their newly acquired skills in a way that reflects what they will encounter in the community. Offline interactive team activities help build collaboration and communication among team members.

The nine courses that make up the Complex Care Certificate can be purchased individually or together as a single curriculum. The curriculum starts with a primer on complex care and is capped with a systems change project. Each course also includes a set of activities that teams can do together to apply the lessons to their population and setting, create a shared framework, and ensure common understanding.

The courses:

• Introduction to complex health and social needs
• Relationship-building in complex care
• Power and oppression in complex care
• Trauma-informed complex care
• Harm reduction in complex care
• Motivational interviewing in complex care
• Care planning in complex care
• Complex care delivery
• Collaboration and communication in complex care teams

If you want to learn more or are interested in training a large group of over 100 learners, please email us at [email protected].

Gaining proficiency in the complex care core competencies

The Complex Care Certificate is rooted in the complex care core competencies, a set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes required by all providers who work to provide holistic care to people with complex health and social needs.

The complex care core competencies have received support from the National Association of Social Workers, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, America’s Essential Hospitals, the National PACE (Programs of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) Association, and more.

If you’re looking to supplement the Complex Care Certificate curriculum with even more resources, be sure to check out our toolkit on core competency education and training.