Annually, Princeton Community Hospital welcomes nurse graduates. In the spring of 2018, PCH offered the first Nurse Residency Program designed to assist graduate nurses with their transition from the classroom to the workplace by supporting and extending the learning process for new graduate nurses.
Rose Morgan, Vice President of Patient Care Services, said, “It is well known in all nursing literature that having a robust nurse residency program greatly enhances the ability to take graduate nurses and have them enter into practice, feel more comfortable, more confident, and get the skills they need more quickly than in a less formalized orientation program.”
The nurse residency program runs for an entire year. It is more intense on a weekly basis for the first three months and then continues on a monthly basis for the remaining nine months. The program includes a component of individualized learning through HealthStream, which is a web-based program. There is a classroom component and there are practical applications of skills learned in the classroom implemented at the bedside.
Each new graduate nurse has a preceptor throughout their orientation period. The preceptors are experienced nurses on the unit where the graduate nurse spends most of their time. In addition, the new nurses participate in hospital-wide orientations programs.