New Graduate Nurses (NGNs) and experienced nurses alike are disillusioned, disenfranchised, and feeling excluded. The resulting impact on quality of care and loss of institutional intellectual capital due to turnover are undeniable.  

Health care organizations’ ability to attract, onboard, and retain NGNs are critical to sustaining safe high-quality patient care. However, nurse executives and nurse leaders alike must move beyond viewing Transition to Practice Programs (TTPs) as the sole tactical fix to address staffing, but rather embrace solutions encompassing a much broader nursing workforce strategy.  

Nurse leaders must look beyond the granularity of justifying these monthly variances and focus on the development of a strategic plan designed to ensure the development of a strong workforce recruitment pipeline with even stronger retention tactics.  

To strengthen the business case, TTPs must be characterized in the context of the organization’s overall workforce development strategy and go beyond cost-driven budget arguments to shift to strategic cost-benefit analysis.

Larissa Africa, MBA, RN, FAONL, FAAN, our VP of Healthcare Workforce Solutions at StaffGarden by Ascend Learning, recently co-authored Create a Burning Platform for the C-Suite: Investing in the Nursing Workforce Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow for Nurse Leader, a leading trade publication. The whitepaper explores what chief nursing executives can do to directly combat the struggles of modern nursing within their healthcare organizations.

From the whitepaper, Africa writes, “The role of chief nurse executive (CNE) in any organization is to ensure that organizational structures and processes promote professional nursing practice, including high-quality patient-centered care delivery.

“This CNE’s strategies included environmental protections such as a smaller span of control for frontline leaders, recruitment strategies that include the adoption of a TTP program, enhancing the role of the education staff, reinvigorating the unit-based preceptor program, and the adherence to a competency-based orientation to maximize NGN confidence in practice and professional growth.”

Read the full article published in Nurse Leader, the official journal of AONL, here.

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