Nurse Residency Programs: Making Practice Safer

Nurse Residency Programs are one way to make nursing practice safer for the patient and to keep nurses from leaving the practice. The Affordable Care Act will increase the number of patients receiving medical care over the next several years. We, as a nation, will need adequate numbers of nurses to fill the void. Many hospitals and universities are constructing nurse residency programs to meet that need. The designation of these programs is to increase knowledge, confidence and job satisfaction of new graduate nurses in their first year of practice. The AACN and University HealthSystem Consortium support the concept of nursing residencies. In 2004, an outline for nurse residency programs became available through their joint effort. Currently, 30 states are currently using the model successfully. The funding for nursing residencies is an area that needs addressing, federal funding for nursing education should include nursing residencies ("Nurse Residency Program," 2012). The purpose of this paper is to describe how this issue can move into a “policy window” using John Kingdon’s Policy Stream Model.

John Kingdon's Policy Stream Model

John Kingdon's policy stream model revolves around a particular policy or agenda. The policy once supported by a policy community becomes a public policy. At a macro level, the basis of Kingdon’s policy model is the description of what is happening in actual current policy development. This model has three separate streams, which represent a window into the politics of modelling policy at macro stages. The model holds that three separate streams - problem, policy, and political streams which all are interlinked, will come together at a decisive moment and then transform into a workable policy. ...

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