Direct support professional training in Tennessee is governed by the Department of Disability and Aging (DDA) — the agency formerly known as the Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (DIDD) — through its published "Training Requirements for Direct Support Professionals and Caregivers" (most recently revised August 2024). The requirements apply to DSPs and caregivers across DDA's HCBS waiver and managed-care programs.

The initial sequence is organized into two deadline blocks. Within 30 days of hire, staff complete TNDIDD 1405 Standard Precautions, HIPAA, Title VI, and Reportable Event training — all four of which also carry annual refresher requirements — plus courses on emergencies, risk management, building relationships, and fire safety, individual-specific on-the-job training, and classroom CPR and First Aid from an accepted certification list. Within 60 days, the second block is due: courses covering choice, employment, an overview of disabilities, the 2023 HCBS settings requirements, professionalism, person-centered thinking, quality of life, systematic instruction, and Positive Behavior Supports Level 1.

Medication administration is a hard state gate: the "Medication Administration for Unlicensed Personnel" certification is delivered only by DDA Regional Office Nursing. It is not available in the Relias catalog and cannot be obtained from any outside vendor — providers schedule staff through their regional office.

The delivery model is the defining feature of Tennessee's system. Since 2013, DDA and all of its waiver providers have operated on a department-provisioned Relias LMS: the required course list is composed of Relias catalog titles (REL-IDD-series and similar) plus DDA-authored TNDIDD courses that are auto-assigned to staff accounts. The requirements document's "crosswalk" column maps only prior DIDD/Relias course versions to current ones — there is no process for approving external curricula in place of the required list.

The open space is real but narrow. The requirements explicitly allow providers to assign "any courses in addition" to the required list, and four formerly required topics — back injury prevention, abuse and neglect, conservatorship, and documentation — have been moved to agency discretion, making them the natural entry point for third-party content. Agencies building stronger onboarding, retention, or specialty-skill programs do that on top of the Relias baseline, not instead of it.

Training and eTracking Solutions is straightforward about what that means: TeTS courses do not substitute for Tennessee's required Relias/TNDIDD sequence, and no vendor's can. Where TeTS helps Tennessee agencies is the discretionary layer — high-quality coursework for the agency-discretion topics (back injury prevention, abuse and neglect, conservatorship, documentation), supplemental and elective training beyond the state list, onboarding enrichment — plus consolidated compliance tracking that keeps Relias completions, CPR/First Aid cards, regional-office medication certifications, and individual-specific OJT in one audit-ready record.