Nurse Residency

[Emily629]

Hello, 

I will be finishing my nursing degree May 2024. I am looking into applying for new grad residency programs - but unfortunately, with the limited options my school provided for clinicals I'm still not quite sure what area(s) interest me the most. The residency programs I am looking into offer the following: (several of them are step down units)

General Surgery

Pulmonary

Cardiology

Neuroscience

Orthopedics/Neurology

Older Adult General Medicine

Acute Medicine

Med surg

Mother/baby

ICU 

Just wondering if anyone has experience with residency programs, what your experience was like, and what unit you worked on. I'm struggling with deciding which unit to apply to. Thank you!

[FiremedicMike, BSN, RN, EMT-P]

My hospital system requires all new grads hired to go through their new grad "residency" which was essentially just an extended orientation period on everyone's respective unit plus a monthly meeting that we all attended together (there was a new cohort starting every few months). 

In theory it was a great idea, but in practice it really just was a whole lot of extra busy work and online modules.  The meetings had limited value because there is only so much overlap between units that we were quickly learning things that only applied to a small number of people in the room (I.e. new grad ED nurses don't need to learn about terminal extubation, new grad obs nurses don't need to learn the rapid transfuser, etc). 

So that was my experience.  They've since overhauled it entirely and put it back onto the individual units to run, not really sure how it's going..