CASE STUDIES & ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

Nurse mentoring program study at a hospital where first-year nurses were paired with tenured nurses to enhance job satisfaction and retention.

Upon graduating with my Master's Degree, my first task was to assess the program effectiveness of a new nurse mentoring study implemented by Palomar Health, a pair of hospitals in north county San Diego, CA.

In my assessment of this program, I met with hospital staff and leadership to discuss what had been implemented and uncover baseline data already collected. My goal was to assess the program that the hospital had already begun implementing, and see if it was working. Their premise for implementing this program was that entry-level nurses during their first year were experiencing job burnout and quitting because they were too overwhelmed to handle the long hours and workload.

The hospital's solution for this was to pair tenured nurses (10+ years of experience) with entry-level nurses during their first year and require them to meet up monthly and form a bond in a mentorship capacity.

In-depth case study with military command center focused on improving operational effectiveness and reducing time to produce intelligence reports.

I worked on a team with three others at Pacific Science & Engineering, and during the summer of 2011 we spent 2.5 weeks on site at a military operational command center in Quantico, Virginia.

The leadership wanted to improve the way they provided information to personnel located overseas who were involved in day-to-day warfighting efforts. They had a sense that the information being sent forward to the front lines was inadequate and difficult for the warfighters to use.