Assess Program on Nurse Mentoring
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Based on the groundwork that had been laid, I immediately started questioning the baseline assumptions. I looked at other research that had been done on the topic of retention and mentorship on work outcomes, and other data from similar hospitals to see what their turnover rates were from first-year nurses.
Over the course of the next 6 months, I worked with senior staff from Pacific Science & Engineering
to design and implement an assessment protocol so that we could obtain regular feedback on how the program was going. I oversaw the survey data collection and incentive program for this assessment, and I organized and led the focus groups that were part of the assessment protocol.
Throughout this ongoing assessment and mentorship study, I performed basic statistical analyses using SPSS and Microsoft Excel, as well as drafted and prepared results reports for review by hospital staff and leadership. Because our sample sizes were small, most of the feedback we provided to the hospital was qualitative in nature and focused heavily on anecdotal evidence from the nurses themselves.
The final conclusion of the study was that nurses found the program enjoyable only as long as they already knew and understood their jobs, but for those entry-level nurses the program was much less effective and in some cases contributed to more job stress and burnout (i.e. it was "one more thing to do" for them). We also looked at data from hospital staff turnover rates and concluded that there was not a significant difference in the turnover rates at this hospital and those published in for the wider nursing profession. So in fact, the reasoning for creating the program and the way it was implemented were likely causing more of the problem the hospital was trying to remedy.
