Nursing Residency Program: A Solution to Introduce New Grads into Critical Care More Safely While Improving Accessibility to Services

Critical care units are particularly affected by the shortage of nurses. In order to overcome this problem, many organizations have increased the hiring of newly graduated nurses. This paper describes a residency program developed to facilitate the safe integration of those nurses into critical care and its outcomes.A one-year nursing residency program dedicated to nurses with less than a year of experience was implemented in 2008. Recruitment and retention rates, as well as accessibility to critical care, were evaluated.A 46% increase in recruitment rate of newly graduated nurses was observed when comparing the same period of time before and after implementation of the program. Moreover, the one-year retention rate rose by 26%; the retention rate, without considering the time since the beginning of employment, rose by 71%. As for accessibility to critical care, it increased by 50% (from 24 to 36 beds). Finally, the program was favourably evaluated by experienced nurses in terms of skills and critical thinking development among nursing residents.A nursing residency program developed to meet the needs of inexperienced nurses and integrate them into high-acuity settings appears to be one solution to resolving undesirable limited access to safe-quality critical care.