Shadowing seasoned nurses, getting hands-on practice caring for patients, meeting fellow students face-to-face and sharing experiences — these activities are key to building a new nurse’s confidence and skills before graduating and moving to their first assignment as a clinical nurse. But many nursing school graduates in 2020 and 2021 had less access to these activities. When preparing to enter the nursing workforce, these new nurses had many reasons to feel more overwhelmed, overstimulated and isolated than their counterparts in years before.
The nurse residency program at Sibley Memorial Hospital bridged some of these gaps. First-time nurses have the opportunity to complete the one-year program, designed specifically to help nurses transition from the academic world of nursing school to the clinical world of bedside practice.
Each new nurse is assigned to a cohort alongside other recent nurse graduates from units throughout the hospital. Monthly seminars feature a wide range of topics from fall prevention, to wound care, to stress reduction techniques and health disparities. By program’s end, every nurse must have completed an evidence-based practice improvement project.
While virtual this past year to keep everyone as safe as possible and align with hospital distancing policies during COVID-19, the nursing professional development and education team put together a focused seminar series designed to cut through clutter and bring vital topics to the forefront.
“In nursing school, there are so many topics thrown at you, and everything is important,” says Charlotte Costello, M.S.N.,R.N., now a second-year nurse in the Silberman Family Special Care Nursery at Sibley. “The nurse residency program’s monthly seminar took those same topics from nursing school and parsed them down to what was most important. The sessions helped me understand the priorities for patient care, and I was able to zero in on a few key areas to focus on in my first year of nursing.”
Perhaps even more important, according to Costello and her fellow cohort member Jess Belford, A.D.N., R.N., who works on a medical-surgical unit at Sibley, is the dedicated time allotted at the end of each seminar for clinical reflections and open discussion.
“I longed for some kind of connection,” says Belford. “That’s why I love nursing — the connections. I didn’t want to be in this hospital, floating around as a brand-new nurse, scared and alone. Were other nurses feeling this way?”
The clinical reflections were an “open forum for everyone to talk about what they had experienced in the last month, what they were maybe feeling stressed about or what made them doubt themselves,” Costello points out. It became a regular venue for new nurses to encourage each other and boost their own confidence through the support of others who felt similarly.
Both Costello and Belford say that in addition to the connections made in the seminars, they also benefited greatly from their work to complete an evidence-based practice project. Their specific project, completed in collaboration with another new nurse, Sydney Walt, B.S.N., R.N., from labor and delivery, involved compiling evidence and preparing a presentation stressing the importance of protected nurse breaks. Their work has gained traction across Sibley.
Belford also credits the nurse residency program with helping her quickly advance to charge nurse in her unit, because the program “touched on everything you can think of to be empowered as a new nurse.”
Both Belford and Costello also say the nurse residency program gave them something else — their ongoing friendship that extends beyond the walls of the hospital. While conducted mainly through text messages, emails and phone calls as the pandemic continued, Costello and Walt hope to later be able to attend the yoga classes that Belford instructs in her spare time, and the three plan to have dinner in person when it’s safe.
“There’s something that connects you just as nurses — even if you don’t work on the same unit or with the same population,” Costello concludes. “I’m grateful to have found them and have them to turn to.”
