Reaching and Teaching: Taking Nursing Professional Development “On the Go” in the Ambulatory Care Arena

Welcome to our world! In our multi-specialty, multi-site, ambulatory care arm of a large academic healthcare enterprise, we were presented with a unique nursing professional development opportunity. In the acute care environment, onsite centralization of educational initiatives and annual competency validation serves to bring the program as close to the learner as possible. Challenges in the ambulatory care world include widespread geography, fewer clinical staff members in given locations, lack of site-based clinical leaders and educators, with an underappreciation of the essentiality of continued education and training for clinical staff.

How can we reach, and teach, our ambulatory care clinical staff who are physically located at over 320 practice sites, across a rapidly expanding footprint? Our answer is twofold: by offering a clinical skills lab and by strengthening the presence of nursing professional development in all geographic regions. Clinical skills lab is a venue where we welcome multiple clinical disciplines, including professional nursing and patient facing ancillary staff. We offer live education sessions led by registered nurse and nurse practitioner instructors who hold expertise in ambulatory care nursing. Curriculum is updated annually and chosen through a variety of methods including internal and external quality findings, regulatory requirements, and updates in practice and technology. Feedback is incorporated from learning needs assessments as well as post-participant surveys.

This presentation will review existing trends and solutions in nursing professional development in ambulatory care settings. We will discuss barriers to the realization of comprehensive clinical education and provide insight into strategies for mitigation. We will share our process in introducing the roles of a director of nursing professional practice and education and clinical operations team in the ambulatory care arena, along with the many benefits of this structure. We will present pre-and post-data from participant surveys that will highlight the impact of a clinical skills lab. Lastly, we will outline the development of our mobile skills lab offering, Skills Lab: On-The-Go, and how this innovation has expanded our bandwidth in bringing hands-on clinical skills curriculum into the hands of the learner. Objectives are that learners will identify 1-2 actionable strategies to bring consistent, quality education and training to all ambulatory care clinical staff and choose 1-2 barriers where they can make an impact.