The support needs of new graduate nurses making the transition to rural nursing practice in Australia

Abstract

The study contributes new knowledge to the discussion of issues concerning support mechanisms for new graduate nurses as they make the transition to rural nursing practice.

Supporting new graduate nurses making the transition to rural nursing practice: views from experienced rural nurses

“…Thematic analysis revealed three major themes representing the new graduate's experience of support at each milestone of transition and these findings have been reported previously (Lea & Cruickshank ). The fourth major theme: The Rural RN's Experience with Newly Graduated Nurses in Rural Practice has three subthemes and this paper reports on one major subtheme: Providing support to newly graduated nurses .…”

“…Also it is not clear to graduates what staff expectations are with respect to exactly what aspects of workload and responsibility they are expected or have license to seek support with. In addition, as previously identified in an earlier paper (Lea & Cruickshank ) rural graduates are reluctant to approach RNs for support during a shift because they observed that the experienced RNs were often busy with their own workload.…”

“…, Lea & Cruickshank ). This has implications for new graduates who are not yet familiar with the clinical care regimes so may find it difficult to delegate because they feel uncomfortable delegating to staff that are more experienced and also in many cases older than them (Lea & Cruickshank ).…”

Coming ready or not! An integrative review examining new graduate nurses' transition in acute care

“…Competence development as a process was a strong theme evident in the literature (Hengstberger‐Sims et al, ; Kumaran & Carney, ; Lea & Cruickshank, ; Lima, Newall, Jordan, Hamilton, & Kinney, ; Lima, Newall, Kinney, Jordan, & Hamilton, ; Olson, ; Pellico et al, ; Takase, Nakayoshi, & Teraoka, ; Wangensteen et al, ). Four of the quantitative studies used the Nurse Competence Scale (Meretoja, Isoaho, & Leino‐Kilpi, ) to assess competence between 4 and 10 months post registration (Hengstberger‐Sims et al, ; Lima et al, ; Lima et al, ; Wangensteen et al, ), demonstrating that at an early stage graduates have a lower self‐assessed competence than later in their transition year.…”

An integrative review of rural and remote nursing graduate programmes and experiences of nursing graduates

“…Being overwhelmed is an emotion that occurs when a person is faced with too much of anything; a prolonged experience of being overwhelmed increases the duration of transition shock. Lea and Cruickshank (, ) and Mellor and Greenhill () revealed that new graduate nurses felt overwhelmed and unprepared and less supported in comparison with metropolitan‐based nurses. Initially, new graduates did not realise that the role would be significantly different from that of a student nurse and consequently experienced a degree of transition shock within the first few weeks of commencing their programmes (Lea & Cruickshank, ).…”