Sedation Certification is the moderate-sedation training program founded by Capt. M. Ron Eslinger, CRNA — a Navy nurse anesthetist who helped write the first Joint Commission-standard conscious-sedation policies for Navy hospitals — and run today by his family from Clinton, Tennessee.
The Captain
Michael R. “Ron” Eslinger graduated from St. Mary’s nursing school in Knoxville in 1970 and completed nurse anesthesia training at the University of Tennessee in 1974. He spent the heart of his career as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist in the United States Navy Nurse Corps, retiring as a Captain in December 2003.
In the early 1990s, as a staff CRNA at Naval Hospital Jacksonville, he sat on the committee that wrote the hospital’s I.V. conscious-sedation policies to meet Joint Commission standards. The policies, training requirements and competencies that committee produced became the foundation for other Navy hospitals — and, years later, for this course. He went on to serve as Chief CRNA and Assistant Department Head for Anesthesia at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth (1996–2001), where he founded the medical center’s Complementary Care Clinic, and as Senior Nurse Executive and Director for Patient Services at Naval Hospital Beaufort (2001–2003). Along the way he earned a Master’s degree from the U.S. Naval War College, lectured to state and national nurse-anesthesia associations across the country, and became known in pain-management circles as “the Captain of Comfort” for his work in clinical hypnosis.
How the course came to be
After retiring from the Navy, Ron kept lecturing on the legal, ethical and clinical questions around nurses giving sedation. Nurses who heard him asked to use the training he had built for non-anesthesia nurses. That demand became a continuing-education course, then — again by request — a certification, the Certified Sedation Registered Nurse™ (CSRN™), and the American Association of Moderate Sedation Nurses that grew up around it. He ran the program through Healthy Visions, the training company he owned in Clinton, Tennessee.
He taught the way he practiced: plainly, with humor, a few magic tricks and a lot of stories from the cath lab and the endoscopy suite. More than 8,000 clinicians have earned the credential since 2015, in every state. Their words are here.
How Ron ties into the course you take today
Every module is his curriculum, taught in his voice on video — pharmacology, airway, monitoring, complications and recovery, with the two competency case studies he wrote to test judgment rather than memory. The manual behind the course, Moderate Sedation for Non-Anesthesia Nurses, is now in its fifth edition.
Ron passed away in December 2024. The program he built continues under his family, who keep the course running, the state guides current, and the certificate and verification records that surveyors ask for available to every graduate and every facility.
What the credential is, and is not
CSRN™ is a program credential. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the American Nurses Association (ANA) or the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). It is a specialty certification designed to support safe clinical practice and facility compliance.
No state board mandates this specific course. What state rules and facility policies generally require is documented competency — and that is what this course is built to produce. Our state guides quote each board’s own language, with the document and page number, so you can check the requirement yourself.
Accreditation
Healthy Visions is approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing, Provider #CEP 17185, for 10 contact hours.
Contact
351 Market St, Clinton, TN 37716 · 1-865-269-4616 · info@sedation.education