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Who You’ll Hear
Kati Kleber, MSN RN CCRN-K – Nurse educator, former cardiac med-surg/stepdown and neurocritical care nurse, author, speaker
Melissa Stafford, BSN RN CCRN SCRN – Highly experienced and currently practicing nationally certified neurocritical care nurse
Chelsea Klekamp, BSN RN – Experienced bedside nurse, Nurse Residency Program Coordinator.
What You’ll Learn
- Common Pathways
- Diving Deeper
- Unit Level
- Organization Level
I Finally Know What I’m Doing – Now What?
Most common pathways
- Precepting
- Being a good preceptor is a challenge.
- Very rewarding
- You focus on teaching skills and competency and are responsible for ensuring the new nurse is safe to care for patients independently.
- Mentoring
- A support person for a newer nurse
- May be informal, or your facility may have formal mentoring programs in place
- Charge Nurse
- Leadership role
- Different use of prioritization, delegation, communication skills
- For more on these roles, check out podcast episodes #43 (Tips for New Nurse Preceptors) and #44 (Tips for New Charge Nurses) if you haven’t already!
Dive a Little Deeper
Individual Level
- Certification
- Clinical area specific (med-surg, critical care, perioperative, NICU, etc.)
- Requirements for clinical hours and continuing education hours to be eligible for certification
- Season 3 Ep 2 about Certifications
- Clinical Nursing Ladder
- With each step of the ladder you are becoming more involved with the organization and the community.
- Usually comes with a pay raise
- Committees
- Falls committee
- Diabetes committee
- Chart audit committee *highly recommended*
- Peer review committee
- Peer interviews
- Quality/safety committees
Unit Level
- Partnership council
- Act as a representative for several of your coworkers
- Discuss your unit-specific topics
- Start as a member, then can rise to co-chair then chair of the council if you choose
- Performance improvement (PI) project
- Look at a process within your unit, dive into the research, implement a change if indicated by the evidence, then evaluate the outcome
- Help conduct, or lead project yourself
Organization Level
- Practice Council
- You are the representative for your unit, meeting with representatives from all other departments (possibly including education, pharmacy, your EMR builders, research, etc.).
- Discuss house-wide issues
- Review/update policies and procedures
- Good introduction to leadership roles and great for networking beyond your unit
Final thoughts
- As a nurse, you have such an opportunity to make a difference– in so many different ways!
- We are at the bedside to witness how care impacts the patient. If we don’t say something needs to be changed, no one will.
- Get involved!
Great content Katie! I find your information quite useful and you help me grow professionally in so many ways. Keep up the good work! (And the jokes!)
It sounds great! I just finished my studies and wondered how I should proceed. I got a job at a ketamine addiction clinic, and I think this will not be a bad start for me. But now I think I need to go further, looking at your paths. Thank you for the article!
I’ve been reading your posts, reviewing the courses you offer, etc since early this morning. I’ve been a nurse for 27 years and like yourself worked in cardiothoracic ICU, neuro ICU, CCU, Cath lab and decided to travel. I was mandated for overtime in the Cath lab which led to 16+ hour shifts. I literally burned out from the best job in my career. I never thought about returning to school for my BSN because I was just completely exhausted! Then in 2006 I was laid off from a position in a brand new Cath lab because I was per Diem and we were not doing many cases. I then went into home care and reapplied at the same hospital back in the Cath lab but it was then that NY state started requiring nurses to have a BSN I thought I could get a position and return to school with the hospital tuition reimbursement…no luck.
I’m looking forward to reading your article on the career path options. And plan on signing up for a few of your other courses
I SERIOUSLY wish I found you sooner! Thank you!