Improving Efficiency for Validating Clinical Skills of New Employees in the Ambulatory Care Clinics to Provide Quality Patient Care

Background: The clinical operations department in the medical network is responsible for validating clinical skills of new clinical staff working in direct patient care roles. This process is in place to ensure staff are competent to perform the essential duties according to their job descriptions. As of November 1, 2021, the list for new employees who require skills validation was 156. One contributing factor was the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in reduced room capacity, and employee availability/willingness to attend due to safety concerns. To reduce the number of new employees working without skills validation, the process was reviewed to identify areas of improvement to increase efficiency, attendance, and patient safety.
Purpose: To reduce the list of new employees who need skills validation to 6 months. Staff scoring >81% (national benchmark) were not required to attend skills lab.
Results: There were 156 new employees on the on the list for skills validation as of November 2021. Post-implementation in December 2021, the list decreased to 111. As of August 2022, there were 73. The median monthly attendance was 28 employees compared to 10 employees prior to implementation.
Conclusions: The interventions were successful in meeting the target of