Practicum Lesson Plan- Nursing Orientation for New Hires
Practicum Setting and Population
The orientation of nurses is crucial in ensuring that they are competent in their new roles and retaining them in those roles. When the orientation and precepting programs are designed to be thorough and detailed, then the result is nurses who are competent and provide quality healthcare services to the patients. The cost of replacing a nurse is much higher than the cost of retaining one. New hires can be graduate nurses who are about to land their first jobs and experience firsthand the profession’s demands, but it could also be a nurse who is transferring in from another hospital. In some cases, a nurse may be moving from a small hospital to a big one or vice versa. Whichever the case of the new hire, it is important that they are oriented well before they begin their new roles. Proper orientation will help the nurse bed in more easily and become a more productive team member. New hires need to learn the standard operating protocols of the hospital and become familiar with the new hospital’s routine. New hires are also more often than not lacking in experience and confidence. They need a good orientation service to enable them to perform to their full potentials. New hires may find their new roles challenging and intimidating. However, it has nothing to do with their qualifications or abilities. Usually, a detailed and well-executed orientation should go a long way in mitigating these factors. New hires must be taken through proper orientation to help them bed in and adjust well, to ensure that the hospital does not experience a high turnover of nurses and guarantees quality service delivery to patients.
Lesson Outcomes and Rationale
The lesson outcomes here will include the following: by the end of the lesson, it should be established that the students have enough training that will enable them to work in a healthcare system that is made of multiple disciplines. Another important outcome is that the new hires can perform duties that cut across multiple disciplines that are present in the environment they are going to work in. the new hires must also have the right attitude and drive that is needed to work in a high-pressure environment that still calls for quality service. If a new nurse does not have the right attitude, they can easily be overwhelmed by the demands that high-pressure multi-disciplinary health environments can impose. The lesson should also ensure that by the end of it, the student can demonstrate a desire to go the extra mile to ensure that they can provide personalized care to the patients. Another desired outcome of the lesson is ensuring that new hires show that they can comprehend patient safety and discuss ways to improve patient safety. New hires must be aware of steps that need to be taken to guarantee patient safety and ways to guarantee patient safety under their care proactively. At the end of the lesson, the strengths and weaknesses of each of the students should be established for them to understand their limitations and areas where they can excel. This is important in establishing which teams to place the new hires in, based on their strengths and what support needs to be offered to them based on their weakness. At the end of the lesson, it should also be clear if the new hire has the requisite communication skills to communicate with patients. When the lesson is completed, the new hire must be ready to provide nursing care on a full-time basis because this is what will be expected of them and if they are not ready, it may not be a good fit.
Teaching strategies
Clinical simulations as a teaching strategy ensure that the student can test their skills in a simulation of a real-life environment. It places the student in a simulation of a hospital setting and simulates the environment that they can expect to find in a real hospital. The simulation labs used in simulation teaching prepare the new hires for all manner of emergencies they will encounter while in a real hospital (Boiling et al., 2017). The main advantage of using this method to teach is that it is possible to simulate the high-pressure environment that an emergency will impose on the nurse and see how well they react and balance the different moving parts. Clinical simulations are as close as the student gets to a real-life hospital situation.
Clinical demonstrations as a teaching method go a long way in enhancing the psychomotor skills of the new hires. When clinical demonstrations are used in teaching, it increases the students’ confidence in their abilities to manipulate a situation instead of if they are taught about the same scenario theoretically (Devi et al., 2019). Clinical demonstrations also enable the new nurses to recall instruction better. Students taught using clinical demonstrations are more comfortable in real-life situations because they can relate them to the demonstrations. New nurses who have not been oriented through clinical demonstrations often have to refer to other resources or consult when placed in real-life situations.
Learning Styles
There are different learning styles among student nurses, and different nurses find themselves comfortable with different learning styles. Kinesthetic learning refers to the method of learning where the student learns best when they are allowed to apply the information they have been taught practically. In this learning style, the student does not retain much of the knowledge they are taught theoretically until they put it into action by application (Mahmoud et al., 2019). The best teaching strategy discussed in this lesson plan that would suit such learners is the clinical simulation. Through the clinical simulation method, the students can test themselves in a practical simulation of the real healthcare environment. By doing this, they can put into practice what they had learned earlier.
Visual learning refers to the learning method where the learner’s knowledge retention is enhanced more when visuals are involved in the instruction based on what they have learned (Mahmoud et al., 2019). The best teaching strategy that would suit visual learners would be clinical demonstrations. This is because learners can see their instructor using demonstrations to reinforce what they have been taught. As they visualize the demonstration and connect it to what they were taught, they understand the content better.
Lesson Plan Content Outline
| Orientation Content | Supporting Details |
| Organizational structure | This will help the new hires understand the strategic goals, mission, vision, values, and how the hospital is structured and the different departments. |
| Communication | It covers the essence of good communication and communication channels |
| Teamwork | Covers the difference between working in a team versus with a team |
| Adaptability | Ensuring that the new hires can adapt to different situations within the healthcare environment. |
| Critical thinking | Discussing the problem-solving loop |
| Conflict resolution | How to resolve conflict with colleagues and patients |
| Assessments | How patient assessments are conducted in the hospital |
| Care Plans | How to develop care plans |
| Progress notes | How progress notes are documented and filed |
| Incident reports | Documentation and filing of incident reports |
| Grievances | Where to channel any grievances that may arise at work |
References
Boling, B., Hardin-Pierce, M., Jensen, L., & Hassan, Z. U. (2017). Implementing simulation
training for new cardiothoracic intensive care unit nurses. Clinical Simulation in
Nursing, 13(1), 33-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecns.2016.09.001
Devi, B., Khandelwal, B., & Das, M. (2019). Comparison of the effectiveness of video-assisted
teaching program and traditional demonstration on nursing students learning skills of performing obstetrical palpation. Iranian journal of nursing and midwifery research, 24(2), 118.
Mahmoud, H. G., Ahmed, K. E., & Ibrahim, E. A. (2019). Learning styles and learning approaches of bachelor nursing students and their relation to their achievement. International Journal of Nursing Didactics, 9(03), 11-20.