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From the staff development bookshelf: Foundation of nurse residency programs: Deciding on competencies

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, May 20, 2011

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To design an effective nurse residency program (NRP), you have to start with the end in mind.

A good NRP starts with a willing but incompetent new graduate and ends with a competent professional nurse. That is often a big leap to take. But what does "competent" mean? What is competency exactly? The truth of the matter is that competency means different things to different organizations, but Donna Wright sums it up pretty well by saying it is "the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attitudes needed to carry out a job" (Wright, 2005).

You will ultimately have to decide what constitutes competence in nurses, how they consider the patients they care for, how they interact with the rest of the healthcare team, how they manage a complex patient assignment, what evidence they base their nursing practice on, and even what kind of employee they will be for the organization.  These can be tough questions to answer, but this chapter will help you define and visualize the competencies you want your new graduate nurses to have when they finish your NRP. Having a clear picture of what a graduate of your NRP is like will allow you to design a program tailored to span the preparation-practice gap at your facility without wasting financial resources on a solution that is too big or too small.

With an understanding of the main conceptual frameworks for new graduate transition into practice, you can begin to get a picture of what specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes (competencies) that new graduates might need to be successful but may not necessarily have fully developed in their nursing program. That is what the NRP accomplishes. It is helpful to have a competency set that is as specific and concrete as possible. That way, you can:

• Identify the set of competencies you desire in graduate nurses in an actionable way
• Have a solid platform on which to build an NRP curriculum to more fully develop those competencies

Source: Book excerpt adapted from Nurse Residency Program Builder: Tools for a Successful New Graduate Program by Jim Hansen, MSN, RN-BC.

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