The Exciting Future of EPICC
Hello EPICC Family,
It has been a few months since we embarked on our combined journey with ROSC Healthcare to ensure the sustainability of the EPICC Programs. Many of you may not know the history of EPICC so I want to give some background and then detail the path forward that we have chosen.
EPICC was “born” in a hotel lounge in Edmonton during the NENA Conference in 2015 when myself (Landon), Monique, Brian, Denis and Melanie met and were venting on the lack of Emergency Nursing education that was Canadian and bilingual. We literally put a proposal together overnight and presented it the next day to the National Emergency Nurses Association (NENA) Board of Directors the next day. The proposal was accepted and us sand NENA went into a 50/50 partnership to develop EPICC-Foundations.
Over the next two years, countless volunteers, test students, and other helpers put together Foundations and quickly after that EPICC-Trauma. Pediatrics followed a couple of years later thanks to another volunteer team that took on the mammoth task. Over time, the programs were transitioned to be solely operated by the Society of Professional in Emergency Care (SoPEC) who is still the entity operating them today.
SoPEC is just the five of us…and we are still all volunteers. Nobody is paid to design anything, nobody is paid to keep the website running, nobody is paid to keep EPIRS running…you get it.
The reality has now hit us. EPICC has grown to the point that this takes a full-time commitment. The five of us at SoPEC have real lives, real jobs, real families and the “burden” of EPICC after the past 10 years has become unsustainable. We have managed to keep the lights on without increasing fees and as a complete volunteer group. In that time, we survived a pandemic, historic inflation, increased travel and hard costs. We haven’t been able to meet as a full team in person since before COVID because of funding issues. This isn’t meant as a sob-story…it is just to highlight our reality. We are proud that we’ve made it this far with the funds that we had but it is not sustainable – wouldn’t it be great if nothing else had increased in cost in the last 10 years? Reality is most things have more-than-doubled and SoPEC has incurred some debt as the world changed and we did not.
Earlier this year, ROSC Healthcare approached us truly believing in the EPICC program. They wanted to help develop it further and wanted to add some stability to it knowing that there was an opportunity to define an entire National care model using the “Assessment, POP, Failures” model that EPICC has become known for. If you have checked out ROSC’s website, you see that they are taking it all to the next level with courses on Inpatient Care, Pre-Hospital, etc. They have also re-created the entire eLearning platform (at their own expense) so that the future is solid for the programs – and some of you have had an opportunity to try the new platform out.
Since the summer and our beginning of our relationship with ROSC, they have been busy in the background evaluating what the program needs to survive into the future. Both SoPEC and ROSC have the passion to continue…but ROSC has the time and the means to take this on. For these reasons, effective January 1st, 2025 we will be formally transitioning the EPICC programs to ROSC Healthcare for operations into the future. Naturally you will have some questions so we will try to answer some below.
Thank you so much for the journey, we will still be around but will be in more of a back-seat than we were before. You are in good hands with the ROSC team and we are truly excited about what they’re going to bring to the future of EPICC.
We encourage you to actively engage with ROSC if you have any questions. They can be reached at rob@roschealthcare.com or through their website at roschealthcare.com
Landon, Monique, Denis, Melanie and Brian
What is happening with SoPEC?
At this stage, SoPEC will continue to exist as the original authors of the program. The five of us will be advisors to ROSC and will have a role in content advice, evaluation models, and program evaluation/recommendations. As the program transitions, we will re-evaluate the role of SoPEC.
What about the program accreditation?
SoPEC will also continue to act as an independent organization responsible for the accreditation of the program – this will separate the accreditation from the revenue in the program. This actually adds a layer of credibility to the accreditation (SoPEC doesn’t benefit financially from saying “accredited” vs “non-accredited”). The other current 2-3 day courses are all accredited by the organization that owns them so we are proud that we are going to keep this distanced review of the program.
Will the programs remain bilingual?
Yes. We have every assurance from ROSC that all programs will remain bilingual. In fact, ROSC’s first support for a rollout of the EPICC programs was in Montreal in November 2024 where they released Triage, Flow, and Operations and the new “Critical Care Anywhere” in both languages. You will be able to communicate with ROSC in either English or French.
Will the cost increase?
Yes. The cost will increase and you will hear from ROSC about this. When hearing about cost increases, please keep in mind that we have never increased the costs over the last 10 years and some of the frustrations many of you have with the program is a result of this. We hope you will be able to stay with delivering EPICC programs and we have full faith that ROSC is willing to hear from all of you about how they can help you achieve that. One thing that ROSC brings is extensive experience in organizational and financial leadership. So if you’re a front-line facilitator or educator, you don’t need to take on worrying about communicating costs within your organization. They are willing to meet with your Senior Leadership and Finance Departments in your organizations and discuss the finances moving forward. They are also looking at models for pre-payment and longer-term arrangements that will see differing cost models.
What will change?
ROSC will have a dedicated team there to help you. While SoPEC members have always been “dedicated”, we have not necessarily always been there to help you. As we balance out real lives, sometimes your learners have to wait for a while before getting answers to questions or online support.
Tired of those Facilitator PDFs that won’t print? Things like this is what their dedicated team will fix. They have people whose jobs it will be to help you. They believe Nurses should be Nursing and educating…not worrying about printing and troubleshooting. They have people for that!
The other main change will be the phasing out of EPIRS and our current eLearning system to newer systems. This change will be gradual and done with minimal impact on you and your learners. Especially with EPIRS, keep doing what you’re doing – we will be doing transitions on the back-end. Keep registering your courses and learners until you hear different. Courses that are “caught in the middle” (i.e., January to March while we transition) will be dealt with by SoPEC and ROSC.
Are the five of you (SoPEC) selling this for a million dollars?
No. The individual members of SoPEC are not being paid for the “sale” of the EPICC Program. There is some financial components in the background (debt, transfer of property, etc); however, the five of us aren’t profiting from this beyond funds that are owed to us. SoPEC is a non-profit Society so can’t be engaged in business with a vision to make a profit anyway. We truly are doing this for the future of the program.
