Nursing
Case Study
Nursing
NYACH has increasingly made investments to support New York City’s nurses at different points of their careers, hoping to keep workers in the profession and increase the number of diverse and foreign-trained nurses in this essential workforce.
In addition to normal professional turnover, COVID-19 has critically strained the nursing pipeline, which is now challenged by the burnout, moral distress, and unresolved grief of workers on the frontlines, early retirements among older nurses, resistance to vaccine mandates, extreme nationwide competition for talent, and limited availability of clinical placements for nursing students.
Supporting Nurse Transitions from Education to Practice
For years NYACH has worked to support the transition of new graduate nurses from education to practice. Beyond the ordinary challenges of starting a new job—meeting new colleagues, managing learning expectations, getting a feel for the facilities—new inpatient nurses have the added pressure of managing patient flow, adapting to 12-hour work shifts, and, importantly, developing a profound sense of responsibility as their actions impact the health and livelihood of real patients.
From the perspective of employers, it is also challenging to work with new graduate nurses who need more support and mentoring than an experienced nurse. Nursing turnover is also bad business and can be particularly costly: national research and NYACH hospital partners estimate that losing a nurse in NYC can cost $100,000 or more in recruitment and associated costs.
NYACH’s work with new graduate nurses began in 2012 in collaboration with Lehman College’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) to provide unemployed, newly licensed, nurses an opportunity to participate in a six-month RN Transition-To-Practice (RN TTP) Program. The RN TTP program successfully supported participants with both a hands-on practicum experience and a monetary stipend, and included both didactic instruction and hands-on clinical training at participating hospitals.
Citywide Nurse Residency Program
Reviewing comparable national models, NYACH built upon the foundational learnings of its RN TTP Program to launch the Citywide Nurse Residency Program (NRP) in 2018 as the nation’s first City-led nurse residency program. Run in partnership with GNYHA, the Citywide Nurse Residency serves a consortium of 28 local hospitals with a best-in-class curriculum developed by Vizient and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), which is implemented by individual hospital nursing education departments, and led by on-site program coordinators and nurse preceptors, with consortium-wide mentorship provided by experienced educators from NYU Langone Health and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Each year more than 1,000 new graduate nurses are supported through this program, and multiple new cohorts begin their residency each month.
Licensing Internationally-Trained Nurses
To help ensure a culturally competent nursing workforce to serve our city where one in three residents is foreign-born, NYACH also enables programming for internationally-trained nurses to achieve the necessary certification to practice in New York State (NYS). NYC’s immigrant community is home to a large population of healthcare workers who can be called upon to serve their own communities, but who are often underemployed due to barriers such as lack of language proficiency or professional networks, and because they do not have the correct New York credentials or licensure.
Since 2011, NYACH has sponsored the NCLEX-RN Preparation for Foreign-Trained Nurses training program in collaboration with NYC SBS and the NYC Welcome Back Center at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College. This program provides a five- to eight-month National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX-RN exam) preparation course for internationally trained nurses at either LaGuardia or Lehman College, focusing on both the English-language skills and nursing skills needed to pass the NCLEX-RN exam and to become a registered nurse in NYS.