BVHS nurse residency program to launch this summer

Blanchard Valley Health System will launch a new nurse residency program in June. The yearlong program will consist of two parts — classes and mentorship. Classes will focus on the basics of nursing, covering topics such as stress management; difficult conversations; and service excellence. Program classes are tailored to what new nurses have said they struggle with. And a lot of what new nurses struggle with is "second-guessing their decisions," says Mike Cifranic, nurse recruitment and retention specialist at BVHS. "The other parts of the classes will be looking at stroke and chest pain and what appropriate actions the nurses should be taking when they have a patient that exhibits those signs or symptoms so that way we can help build some of their clinical reasoning skills," said Jessica Geckle, a clinical resource nurse at BVHS who teaches system orientation. New nurses enrolled in the residency will also be paired with a mentor who is a clinical resource nurse in their unit. Nurses who have graduated the residency program can also become mentors for the next group, Geckle said. Any new graduate with six months or less of nursing experience will be automatically enrolled in the nurse residency program when they join the BVHS team. The program offers rolling admission, so a new nurse will join whenever they are hired by BVHS, rather than having to wait until the next year. "Many of the nurses who are coming out in the field, this is their very first career," Cifranic said. "You can kind of think of (the program) as a support group." Success of the program will be measured by subjective and objective data. "We'll be surveying the nurses (at) different intervals and checking in with them and seeing what their comfortability is with different types of skills and competencies," Geckle said. Geckle also said that nurses' progress on the floor with patients will also be tracked as they advance through the residency. Objective data will include employee turnover, burnout and retention, Cifranic said. "After we have gotten all this data after a year, the plan is we'll meet about it," Geckle said. "We'll have a group that will look at all this data and information and decide whether or not we need to make changes to our program." Geckle plans on changes being made within the first few years of the residency program, but both she and Cifranic are confident the program will help instill confidence in nurses. "What the residency program does is ... it gives you those tools of success, so that way you're able to focus," Cifranic said.