SPRINGFIELD - Thanks to an Incumbent Worker Training Program grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Crozer-Keystone Health System has implemented an Emergency Nurse Fellowship Program, a six-month pilot training program available for graduate nurses already employed by the health system. Designed to expose program participants to both intensive clinical and didactic training, the program allows nurses to become specialists in the field of emergency medicine at an accelerated pace.
“The fellowship program is wonderful because it benefits both the health system and the community,” says Eugene Zegar, vice president of Human Resources for CKHS, and a member of the team that has helped to implement the program. “We’re providing more well-qualified and well-trained nurses to work in the Emergency Department and for the community.”
While allowing graduate nurses who want to work in a CKHS emergency department the chance to become an emergency department specialist without the typical one-year experience in a medical or surgical setting, the program also hopes to alleviate some of the strain of an emergency nursing shortage in the system, a shortage that is expected to peak state-wide in 2010. While the health system’s vacancy rate is below the national average, vacancies still do exist, and recruiting nurses to fill the vacancies in a timely manner has become problematic.
“Recruiting experienced emergency department nurses has been exceedingly difficult over the past few years,” says Nancy Bucher, chief nursing officer for CKHS and vice president of Patient Services at Crozer-Chester Medical Center. “Having this grant makes it possible to provide comprehensive education to the new nurse as he or she prepares for this very challenging role in the emergency department.”
“Our hope is that our program will give the nurses the skill set and knowledge base to be successful emergency department nurses,” says Krista Burnell, project coordinator for the fellowship program “Long term, it is our goal that this program will help decrease the vacancies in the emergency departments across our health system and improve retention of current and new staff.”
The program, which began in July, assigns 20 fellows to emergency departments in the system. Currently, Taylor Hospital has four fellows, Delaware County Memorial Hospital has six fellows and Crozer has 10 fellows. All of the fellows rotate to the emergency department at Springfield Hospital for a day and participate in several clinical rotations that are specific to each hospital. For example, all students will come to Crozer for rotations in the Nathan Speare Regional Burn Treatment Center and the Crozer Regional Trauma Center. Students at Taylor will go to either DCMH or Crozer for Pediatric, and Labor and Delivery rotations.
The program includes several skills courses, designed to familiarize the fellows with the wide-ranging issues that nurses often encounter in the fast-paced environment of an emergency department. Course topics include IV therapy, hazardous materials, triage, critical care, trauma, pediatrics, dysrhythmias, emergency room care and aggression management. In addition, the fellows are required to become certified in Advanced Cardiac Life Support and Pediatric Advanced Life Support through other classes offered in the health system.
Fellows also participate in lab classes, specifically with the Laerdal SimMan, a full-body mannequin that provides realistic patient-care scenarios by simulating a pulse and blood pressure. The SimMan allows fellows to practice CPR and IV insertion, among other things.
“Compounded with speaker presentations from individuals within the health system and honorarium speakers, classroom instruction by professors from program partners Widener University School of Nursing and Neumann College Department of Nursing, free textbooks, PDAs, an online forum for fellows to communicate with each other and review and submit classroom assignments, and three clinical educators who specifically provide clinical instruction to the fellows, the program provides the nurses with all the right resources to succeed,” Burnell says.
“We’re providing them with a lot of educational resources that they normally wouldn’t have,” she continues. “We want them to be successful so we’re giving them all the tools they need.”
To be accepted into the program, nurses must currently work for the health system, have had a 3.0 grade point average, have two letters of recommendation from former instructors and a positive recommendation from their current supervisor. They also have to commit to work in a CKHS emergency department for 18 months after the program, for a total of two years total service to the health system.
The fellows will be participating in the program as graduate nurses until they take the Pennsvylvania State Boards before the end of August. If the fellow passes, he or she then becomes a registered nurse. The fellowship program culminates after six months with a graduation ceremony at Neumann College’s Life Center.
“At the conclusion of the Fellowship Program, we hope each nurse will meet the entry standards for emergency department nurses as defined by the Emergency Nurses Association,” Burnell says.
“We hope to pave the way for other health systems in the area to mimic a program such as this to address the nursing shortage,” says Connie Sonder, director of Patient Services.