Wythe County Community Hospital starts residency program for new nurses

WYTHE COUNTY, Va. (WDBJ) - A community hospital in one of our hometowns is starting a new program to help build confidence in new nurses and hopefully retain them to better healthcare for us here in Southwest Virginia.

Wythe County Community Hospital is starting a new nurse residency program.

For a full year new nurses who have graduated from college will be working with preceptors who will mentor them to become successful healthcare providers.

“Evidence has shown that they need the ability to be able to bridge the gap, we have an academic little bit of a delay in them getting from nursing right into a hospital setting,” said Theresa Dix, Chief Nursing Officer.

The program breaks up the year into three phases including clinical competence, culture transition and leadership development.

“The preceptors are going to be working one on one for the first twelve weeks with the new grad RNs and they’re the ones that are really going to identify the needs, and any challenges that their new grads are having and to really facilitate all of that learning all of those critical thinking skills, all of the hands-on development and practice that is needed to be a bedside nurse,” said Kayla Helewski, Clinical Educator, On Site Coordinator.

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Leaders of the program hope this will prevent burnout.

“We have found that in particularly since COVID, we’re seeing burnout a lot easier, a lot quicker in new grads and a new nurses within that first year, this residency program helps us bridge that first year, helps us retain them, helps them feel stronger as a nurse, and then we’re able to keep them in our community, we’re able to build the nurses that we want to have, with the skill set that we want to have,” said Dix.

“After a year, a lot of new grads would leave the facility they started at to seek other opportunities or to leave nursing altogether. So retention is a huge part of getting nurses in here and developing them and then wanting them to stay here because you’re pouring so much time and energy and knowledge and skills and experience into them. Those are the nurses you want to keep are the ones that have all of that experience and knowledge and to continue to grow with them,” said Helewski.

They say being able to keep well trained nurses can benefit all those who need medical care in Southwest Virginia.

“We do sit on the intersection of 81 and 77. So we are a very busy little community facility. We do recognize our limitations when we cannot take care of a patient here and we need to escalate them to a higher level of care. But it is important that we have nurses that are well trained, nurses that can work in a rural setting that’s not used to all of the resources that maybe a bigger facility has. I do feel like the nurses that have been in our hospital and have stayed here for a long time, are very well trained, can critically think very well and take excellent care of our patients,” said Dix.

To learn more about the program click here.