Title: The nursing orientation passport: Development, implementation and evaluation of a nursing new hire onboarding tool
Abstract:
University Health Network (UHN) is one of Canada’s leading health care and medical research organization. The scope of research and complexity of cases at UHN has made a national and international source for discovery, education and patient care. UHN is comprised of four hospitals including Toronto Rehabilitation Institute (TRI). TRI is the largest rehabilitation hospital in Canada. The interdisciplinary teams, including nursing at TRI are dedicated to helping patients recover from injury, illness, or age-related conditions and are passionate about improving the health and well-being of patients and their families.
Within a large and advanced organization like UHN-TRI, the hospital continuously hires a large nurses of year-round. The Advance Practice Nurse Educators (APNE) for the specific programs provide support during the new hire’s orientation as well as ongoing support post-orientation. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the APNEs support, newly hired nurses were often found to leave their position, which is at great cost to the organization and patient care. In response to these findings, TRI APNEs collectively decided to develop, implement and evaluate a nursing new hire orientation onboarding tool, “The Nursing Orientation Passport” in 2021 to provide direction, foci and support to new hires.
The tool highlights an onboarding pathway, a milestone toolkit (focusing week to week objectives, activities and resources), a detailed 6-week schedule (discussing corporate orientation content and unit orientation), required e-learnings, scheduled meetings with APNE and unit leadership, feedback forms to be completed by the new hire and preceptor and off boarding sign offs for end of orientation and end of probation periods.
The utilization of the passport commences from week 1 of corporate orientation. The passport is provided to the newly hired nurse by the APNE who explain, the purpose, related processes, and times. The weekly APNE touchpoints are completed together with the documentation from the Nursing Orientation Passport. The guidance of the APNE in addition to the tool is set to provide direction, support and clarity for the new hire.
Following a retrospective evaluation of the passport in Fall 2023, qualitative and quantitative findings suggest a satisfactory compliance in completion of the passport, increase length of stay in position, positive professional development and positive feedback of the onboarding tool.
Audience Take Away Notes:
Though the onboarding tool was designed in 2021, it has been continuously updated with the most recent version finalized on Dec 2023. From 2021 to present date new hires have been utilizing the passport as an onboarding pathway tool and as an initiation process for their professional development. Retrospective findings highlighted the following:
• Satisfactory compliance in completion of the passport
• Increase length of stay in the new hire position
• Positive professional development
• Positive feedback of the onboarding tool. Most new hires stated that “ he/she would recommend the usage of the passport for future new hires as supportive onboarding tool”
The presentation of this onboarding tool to the international audience would enhance further understanding of the standardized onboarding tool, increase knowledge on how to sustain new hire’s length of stay in the position (particularly new graduates) as well as gain understanding on how to provide support for nursing’s professional development with this supplemental document
