Supporting Graduate Nurses' Transition to Practice: Outcomes of a Pilot Resiliency Training Program

Purpose: As health care gains complexity and patients are seeking care with increasing acuity, the nursing profession needs to be able to respond appropriately and provide safe, competent, and steadfast interventions. Nursing education curriculum across the country are challenged with the task of preparing future nurses to not only provide such care, but also transition from student to professional. Ideally, this transition happens with grace and ease, but statistics show that the rigors of a graduate nurse’s first position in the workforce can be overwhelming. This translates as job turnover, compromised patient safety, psycho-social depreciation of the nurse, and in some cases, departure from the profession. Considering the above, the purpose of this project will be to identify the impacts of resiliency training on new graduate nurses in a nurse residency program (NRP).

Methods: A pre- and post- test interventional study using within subjects design will be implemented. Participants will include newly graduated registered nurses and practical nurses enrolled in a hospital-based nurse residency program. A multimodal approach to resiliency training will be executed via six monthly sessions (August 2019 to January 2020) and embedded within the existing NRP curriculum. The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale 25 (CD-RISC-25) will be used to discern the effectiveness of the training.

Results: During and after the nurse residency program, the hope is that participants will incorporate professional self-respect and assertiveness to articulate and foster their inherent levels of resilience. This will translate as a comprehensive increase in the new nurse cohort’s CD-RISC-25 scores. Moreover, help ease their transition into professional nursing practice.

Conclusion: When speaking of the dynamics and complexity of our current health care system, transition into nursing practice and the concept of resilience share these features. Certainly, nursing programs across the country strive to prepare future nurses in the best possible ways. This is accomplished via demanding curriculum that include simulation, clinical experiences, and didactic instruction with an overarching influence of best evidence. Still, not even the perfect program can fully prepare a new nurse for the stressors, rigors, and challenges of our profession. This brings to light the importance of tapping into new nurses’ ammunition for reacting and adapting to their transition into practice. Part of that ammunition surrounds resilience. Further, resilience-building interventions may provide just what an entry-level nurse needs to take the journey and come out on the other side as stronger, more capable, and optimistic about their professional future.