Improving Clinical Nursing Leadership Skills in the Novice Nurse

Abstract

PURPOSE: There are special demands of leadership, particularly from psychiatric nurses (Sundberg et al., 2021; Mildon et al., 2017). To be an effective leader on the unit, nurses need to respond to patient escalations appropriately. However, nurses with less than three years of experience since licensure lack the preparation and experience to recognize and respond to patient escalations appropriately. The purpose of this quality improvement project is to design and conduct a pilot implementation of an education session to improve novice nurses’ knowledge, skills, and comfort with assessing, responding to, and communicating safety and risk concerns presented on a pediatric/adolescent psychiatric unit at Bradley Hospital. METHODS: Two novice psychiatric nurses participated in this project, which consisted of a 1.5-hour session that included didactic, breakout session, and debrief. They completed pre- and post-test surveys on knowledge and comfortability with material and the post-test survey had additional questions to evaluate the program. These surveys were adapted from Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation. RESULTS: Participants were satisfied with the intervention, and their knowledge and comfortability in managing, assessing, and communicating safety risk on the inpatient unit improved. Limitations include the small sample size, social desirability bias, and limited qualitative data. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Next steps include implementing this project on a larger scale for more data, determine the effectiveness of the project, and apply the intervention to other types of units.