Your upcoming role as an ESN will likely be the first step in your professional nursing career. While this may be a bit daunting, your career will likely span decades. The habits you create now will help set you up for success. We’d like to get you started off on the right foot!
The following sections will help you to create good work habits, establish a strategy for lifelong learning, and guide you to supports & resources that can help with your transition from student to Employed Student Nurse. As you go through the sections, remember that “The first three months of employment following graduation is the most stressful time in a nurse’s career” (Jewell, 2013). Think of how you can use this opportunity to create a personalized plan for yourself to help mitigate those stress factors upon graduation.
Here are some useful tips & tricks to help get you started:
Lots of people struggle with shift work. If we choose not to adjust our lives to the realities of shift work, we can experience excessive fatigue, increased stress, and be prone to accidents. The below handbook was created with the shift worker in mind, and contains strategies on how to best prepare for working shiftwork.
Identifying learning needs, learning goals, and formulating strategies to help fill these gaps is a key part in creating habits which will lead to lifelong learning, improvement, and expertise. To help optimize your learning and foster your growth in deliberate practice, you will complete the Continuous Competency Assessment (CCA) tool after you finish your Unit Orientation. Note that the tools are based on your chosen profession’s Standards of Practice.
Steps to completing the CCA tool:
Please keep in mind that this is a tool to help guide your learning, not a formal evaluation of your performance. Be honest with yourself, and accept that nursing practice is a journey which you’ve just started to embark on!
As you probably already know, there are lots of policies to help guide your nursing practice. But did you know that there are also professional policies & guidelines in the workplace? Two particular policies that you should be aware of include the Professional Image Guideline, and the Social Media & Online Communication Policy. Be sure to review them when you’re on site. Here are some of the key points:
Although you already have a school-related CCRS account, now that you’re a VCH employee you’re required to create a VCH, employee-related CCRS account. These instructions were provided in the e-mail you received along with your Regional Orientation information.
The below CCRS courses may be of use to you for your own professional development.
Open up your pdf copy of the “ESN Reflections” file. Take some time to answer Question 10:
10. Thinking back to the quote: “The first three months of employment following graduation is the most stressful time in a nurse’s career” (Jewell, 2013), how might you use your ESN experience to help mitigate the stressors related to this?
