A Nursing Career Progression Program for Rapid Cross-Skilling of Experienced Nurses to Women's Services
Photo credit: zinkevych/Adobe Stock
Poster Program
Purpose for the Program
The COVID-19 pandemic created shifts in desired specialty-related nursing competencies. To match the nurse resource gaps with available clinician interests, perinatal educators developed the Nursing Career Progression Program (NCPP). This program was used to train nurses from different specialty areas that were experiencing excess supply, due to COVID-19 restrictions, to redeploy to roles within the inpatient obstetric service line to meet substantial demands.
Proposed Change
Creation of an accelerated cross-skilling program for experienced nurses from various acute-care specialties to transition them to the labor and delivery and mother-baby units.
Perinatal educators, tasked to seek an innovative approach to orient displaced nurses, designed the NCPP to provide a quality orientation program in a reduced time frame. The educators reduced the orientation time frames to approximately 60% of the time customarily used for experienced registered nurses who are new to the inpatient obstetric specialty by modifying the didactic education and clinical experiences. To minimize the effect of reduced training times on job satisfaction, enhanced, one-on-one support from perinatal educators and a 75% retention of participants at 6-month and 1-year postorientation were integrated into the objectives of the NCPP.
