Putting The Pieces Together: It Takes a Whole Village To Raise a Novice Nurse
Title: Putting The Pieces Together: It Takes a Whole Village To Raise a Novice Nurse
- Increase collaboration between the nurses and physicians in order to help them work together as a team to provide safer patient care.
- Engage the staff to be involved and accountable for their practice.
- Increase the knowledge of our interns by improving the internship process and increasing the education level on the labor and delivery unit.
Being a part of the leadership team, I have discovered that our new nurses were going through our internship program and learning the basic skills to care for laboring patients, but didn’t always know why they were doing what they were doing. They were going through the motions, but not always seeing the big picture and putting all the pieces together. The more experienced staff and physicians weren’t working to help educate and engage our young nurses and weren’t always engaged or accountable for their own practice.
Proposed change:
I believe that when staff are provided the knowledge to care for their patients and are engaged and accountable, they will provide safer patient care with less errors with an increased patient focus. Better collaboration between the nurses and physicians and an internship with qualified clinical coaches will allow them to take ownership of their practice and provide patient centered care. This will give them the desire to continue to learn and advance in their career.
Implementation, outcomes and evaluation:
The process began by having the staff complete a short survey.This included their perception of teamwork, engagement, accountability, education, patient focus and safety, and collaboration among the nurses and physicians. We then tallied the results which yielded engagement, RN to MD collaboration, patient safety and our education/internship with the lowest scores. We will now have teams work on these areas of focus to include physician attendance at staff meetings, classes for clinical coaches, policy education, weekly educational inservices, and much more. At the end of our project, we will re-survey the staff to see if we made improvement in these areas. We will also track our staff reporting system to determine if we had decreased errors.
Implications for nursing practice:
With today’s changing healthcare system, it will be imperative to provide nurses with the necessary education and support to provide safe patient care. By starting with your new graduates, the knowledge, engagement and accountability of your staff will start to increase and in turn produce better patient outcomes.
Keywords: novice, engagement, accountability, internship, collaboration