Nurses play an imperative role in ensuring the provision of high quality health care. They apply their skills and knowledge ensuring the provision of safe and competent health care in the ever changing environment. Therefore, clinical competency of the nurses plays an imperative role and comprises a major component in nursing education and training academically and in the working environment. Orientation in nursing can be defined as the process through which nurses are intellectually, functionally and emotionally directed. Standardization of the orientation programs across different training institutions is essential as nursing student must be oriented in every institution they are assigned to for training.
The coordination of orientation programs has been a challenging task in clinical training since it is time consuming and labor intensive. Nursing orientation enables nursing students to meet their educational and professional requirements. The complexity of orientation programs has been a major challenge towards standardization of the orientation during trainings. However, the developments in technology have facilitated the development of online orientation programs used in different institution nursing training. Standardization of orientation programs has been essential in reducing the time taken during faculty instructions, facilitating the transition of nursing into their professional clinical areas.
Population of Interest
The population of interest considered for this process comprises nurses in the health department. The main purpose of the process involves facilitation of training and education that furthers their competency. The orientation process will focus on improving certain aspects of nursing competencies such as teamwork and collaboration, health informatics, improving the quality of health and techniques used in measuring the quality.
Intervention of Interest- Retraining of Nurses
Orientation process has been imperative in enhancing the health needs of the health care system facilitating improvements and standardization in the delivery of health care. Therefore, the main purpose of orientation is to facilitate training and education of nurses. The health care system in most of the institutions is aimed at facilitating the development of seamless organizations. The need to redesign the orientation process originates from the aspect of improving the education offered to nurses in the health care system. Therefore, this paper seeks to evaluate the orientation process from the aspect of improving training and education of nurses to improve their scope and competency.
There have been numerous attempts aimed at redesigning the orientation process and develop and standardized process. This has emanated from the perspective variation and redundancies of the existing orientation process across the health care system. Orientation process is one of the most essential parts of nursing training and competency of nurses should not be questioned if high quality services are to be offered in the health care system. The main goals of the orientation process are facilitating students to receive consistent information in regard to policies, procedures, standards and documentation that support their practices. Students are able to familiarize themselves with health care systems learning the mission, vision, values, goals and organizational structure.
The orientation process also facilitates student to further their skills and competencies in different areas of their duties such as responding to emergencies and an understanding of their work environment. The overall goal of the orientation process is the improvement of competency addressing the issues and challenges facing nurses. The process also prepares nurses equipping them with knowledge, skills and ability that facilitate continuous improvement of quality of services delivered. There are various competencies and skills that will be focused on this process, which will include patient centered care, evidence based practice, informatics and safety, teamwork and collaborations, and quality improvement. This will also focus on training nurses on the importance of increasing focus on health information technology, patient safety and techniques of measuring the quality of health care.
Outcome of Interest: Increased Knowledge with Structured Development Tool
The basic purpose of standardized orientation aimed at training and educating nurses was the need to improve their skills and competency. Standardization would serve the purpose of improving competency connecting educational skills with practice, improving behavior and outcomes in their performance. The process involved the development and delivery of a universal process and structure of orientation that determines the core competency measure. The standardized orientation process would also serve the purpose of eliminating variations of measure used to measure competencies. A standardized orientation process would also remove redundancies and improve the quality of nursing orientation process.
Standardization of the orientation process would facilitate the reduction of passive approaches of learning in the delivery of education and validation of the knowledge learned. The process would also establish clear and mutually understood expectation of the differences between education and practice. There are no tools of comparison since it involves a new process that seeks to redesign the orientation process through the adoption of a standardized process. The process involves a comprehensive process that will take a period of one year. One year is sufficient to ensure that all procedures of the process are adopted and outcomes measured.
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