By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN
“How do you teach two years of nursing school in a 12-week new graduate residency program?” It was a question asked by a nurse leader in a recent webinar. You don’t I answered, and you can’t. If anything, because of the pandemic’s impact on educational systems, this year’s new graduates are the least work-ready group of new nurses ever to graduate. They are entering acute care environments without seasoned nurses to serve as preceptors. The patients are more acutely ill, and on most units, there are no easy patients to assign to these new nurses. Patients and families are far less understanding, less thankful, and more likely to complain about their care rudely.
Increasingly, nurse managers across the country are seeing new nurses coming to them after a few short months with an intent to leave nursing. They feel unprepared to deal with the complexity of healthcare environments today. They are right in feeling a lack of psychological safety as they attempt to transition.
All of these developments in health systems are occurring with the backdrop of the new AACN Essentials-2021in nursing education, promoting more competency-based education. These new essentials aim to graduate more “work-ready” nurses. I have done several workshops recently with nursing faculty who look at the massive list of competencies expected of graduates and wonder aloud how and whether they can even design a curriculum to do this.
I tell them that there is no way in two years you can educate young nurses with all the knowledge, skills, and behaviors necessary to function in the complex environments they will work in. My viewpoints have been informed by 25 years in practice environments as a leader and 19 years as a tenured professor responsible for curriculum development.
The idea of a “work-ready” new graduate is aspirational. Still, it perpetuates a myth that is now leading many young nurses to leave their profession early in their careers, believing that something is wrong with them. We can’t kid ourselves about how challenging nursing work is today. Developing new essentials is not the answer to the problem of too little hands-on clinical in nursing programs to effectively make a transition into practice. Either new graduate onboarding will need to extend well beyond what is now happening in most environments, or we should redesign nursing programs using a work-study model where academic and practice settings collaborate to provide upskilling. The future of our profession depends on our willingness to shift our expectations and provide these young nurses with what they need to effectively practice.
© emergingrnleader.com 2022
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