Orienting in a Virtual World

We are clinical supervisors at the after-hours program of The Children's Hospital of Phila. We are a pediatric telephone triage call center. Our staff consists of RNs and intake representatives who have worked from home locations since 2009. Our nurses triage using Schmitt-Thompson protocols. One of our job responsibilities as clinical supervisors is to orient new hires. Our orientation consisted of classroom time and time spent in the office with a preceptor or in a preceptor's home. In the recent pandemic, we found ourselves having to plan completely virtual orientations. We utilized Skype, Teams, EPIC and Cisco Finesse. Through sharing screens in Skype and Teams and using "supervisor mode" in Cisco Finesse, we were able to successfully orient a nurse and an intake representative virtually. We will continue to use this plan going forward. We learned from these experiences that starting an orientee at home from the beginning allows for more flexibility in scheduling the orientation. As an added benefit, we were able to involve more staff in the "classroom" part of the orientation. This enabled the new hires to meet more of the staff and feel connected to the team from the beginning.