Succession Planning: Creating A Case for Hiring New Graduates

With an aging nursing workforce and rising patient acuity levels, healthcare institutions are challenged to meet the demand for competent nursing care Swedish Medical Center (SMC) adopted an aggressive approach for building a new graduate residency program to promote new graduates' opportunity to tap into the valuable expert knowledge and wisdom of retiring nurses. Nursing leadership chose to take an unorthodox approach by identifying new graduates as their hires of choice, citing the ability to create and influence the values and professional practice of the novice nurse as a desired advantage. The program's success focused on adding three key elements to the traditional 1:1 preceptor support model: cohort hiring, monitoring progression to competence, and simulation. SMC is confident this strategy for workforce succession planning will continue to be successful both financially and with regard to patient care quality.