Innovative approach to integrating New Graduate Nurses into Perinatal Nursing
The nursing shortage has challenged all areas of the profession to recruit and retain nurses. The declining numbers of nurses entering the profession, advancing age of existing nursing staff and nurses leaving the profession are at the forefront of nursing concerns. In Ontario, for specialty areas of nursing practice such as, perinatal nursing, these challenges are compounded by the fact that nursing student experiences in perinatal nursing are not a mandatory part of undergraduate nursing education. As a large tertiary acute care centre, we are faced with the challenge of recruiting, integrating and retaining new graduate nurses in the perinatal program.  With the support of additional funding from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s New Graduate Guarantee, we were provided with an opportunity to rethink and redesign how we integrated new graduate nurses into our program. Our goal was to provide an exceptional orientation, which would build and develop their knowledge and skills as perinatal nurses, and to provide them with a structured social integration into this new professional role.
Building on the success of our Undergraduate Nursing Student Perinatal Nurse Program, we developed a competency based curriculum that focused on preparing new graduate nurses to be successful in caring for women and their families in one of three areas of nursing practice: High Risk Antenatal Unit, Labour and Delivery, and, Mother Baby Unit.  The orientation consisted of alternating theoretical and core perinatal nursing concepts followed with immersion in the clinical setting to facilitate immediate application to practice of concepts learned. We used a preceptorship model that required preceptors to collaborate and facilitate learning across clinical settings.
The New Graduate Perinatal Nursing Program was launched in May 2008, with the intake of 15 new graduate nurses. The initial response to this program has been overwhelming. This paper will provide a description of our program goals, design and initial outcomes and lessons learned.