A vital aspect of a nursing professional development practitioner's (NPD) calling is engaging new nurse residents. Along with their full NPD team, Veronica Bigott, MSN, RN, ACNS-BC, MEDSURG-BC, GERO-BC, NPD-BC, and Stephanie Zidek, PhD, RN, ACGNS-BC, NEA-BC, NPD-BC, brought about successful health education pop ups held at a local high school, simultaneously supporting high school students and new nurses. They achieved this by exemplifying the NPD responsibilities “role development” and “collaborative partnerships” as described in Nursing Professional Development: Scope & Standards of Practice (Harper & Maloney, 2022, p. 35 - 38).    

At the 2024 ANPD Aspire Convention held April 2024, Zidek and Bigott shared their experience. This article summarizes the process, results, and successes from the initial program, while also highlighting opportunities since Aspire.

Wanted: Engagement Opportunities for New Nurses

Advocate Health (Midwest Region) New Graduate Nurse Residency (NGNR) program welcomes more than 1,500 nurse residents annually. The program extends over six months with optional post-residency opportunities that support nurse engagement and retention. The NGNR program delivers an evidence-based practice curriculum, including topics such as delegation, time management, well-being, posttraumatic growth, communication, mentorship, critical thinking, and ethical decision-making.

Early in 2020, the NGNR program set out to design a community outreach option for interested nurse residents. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic paused many potential community-based initiatives and shifted the focus for the future of the program. In 2022, the NGNR NPD team opted to revisit community outreach planning with a diverse group of nursing professional development practitioners, using the hackathon approach.

Leveraging a Hackathon’s Most Viable Pitch

To inspire ideas, the NPD team conducted a hackathon—a creative problem-solving approach. Hackathon is a mashup of “marathon” and “hacking”—a word that began with negative connotations of cybercrime but now also means creative problem-solving. The hackathon, which originated in technology-based communities, brings individuals together to develop innovative solutions. Hackathons traditionally require minimal preparation and allow for dynamic group brainstorming. At the end of a hackathon, the most viable pitch (MVP) is voted for. This winner is then fast-tracked for implementation.

The NPD team’s goal was to walk away from the hackathon with an innovative approach that would keep nurse residents engaged in residency and beyond. The hackathon, held in 2022, focused on social determinants of health (SDOH), which fit into the hospital system’s strategic plan focus on SDOH initiatives. The NGNR program was identified as a driver to encourage nurse residents to engage in community outreach efforts geared toward (SDOH      initiatives, including assisting with food banks, health fairs, and housing shelters. These opportunities allowed nurse residents to give back to their community and apply real-world experience in the clinical setting to enhance patient care delivery.

The hackathon brought forth a wide variety of ideas that could be implemented, with the winning most viable pitch surrounding a social media platform targeting youth and adolescents with health and wellbeing strategies. To honor the hackathon approach, this idea was fast-tracked within the NPD team and nurse residency team.

Bringing the Idea to the Hospital and Beyond

As the NPD team explored how to bring the most viable pitch to life, they reached out to the public affairs and social media teams within their organization. This led to discovering a hospital connection with the nonprofit organization B Strong Together. B Strong Together is an organization aimed at developing healthy, resilient youth in the community. The organization plans community events, hosts parent coffee chats, partners with local experts and organizations, and creates educational resources. Initial brainstorming sessions with B Strong suggested nurse residents teach parents how to bring up healthy lifestyle strategies with their youth; however, the NPD team was hesitant to ask new nurses to teach parents about challenging topics, such as drugs and alcohol, as this could raise new nurse stress. Another idea that came up was a lunch and learn, where nurse residents could pick a health education topic that could be promoted on social media and then taught at a school library.

Initially, the latter idea was a winner for the NPD team. However, they decided to first bring it to a high school student advisory board connected with B Strong. After pitching the idea to the students, they realized it did not have the legs they’d hoped. Students shared, very kindly, that they would not love the idea of spending their lunch hour—where they normally connect with friends—on a lecture.

The NPD team leveraged their time with the student advisory board to ask questions that would further hone their idea: What would help meet their needs? This is where the “pop-up” event concept was born. Essentially, the pop-up event would consist of nurse residents hanging out outside the school’s cafeteria during lunch engaging students on a health-related topic as they walked by.

Hosting the First Event: Stress Prevention

B Strong Together hosted the first-ever pop-up event at a local high school in December of 2022 over the lunch hour on the topic of stress prevention. The event happened right before finals, so the timing was perfect. To engage students, the nurse residents utilized whiteboards and fun giveaways (such as avocado stress toys, which were a huge hit). The educational method was simple: Teaching Dr. Laura Vater, MD, MPH’s SMILE scale (The SMILE Scale), which allowed students to quickly assess their progress toward key well-being factors that contribute to stress:

• S - Sleep enough.
  • Did I sleep seven to nine hours today? Was my sleep restorative?
• M - Move my body.
  • Was I physically active for 30 minutes or more today?
• I - Inhale. Exhale.
  • Did I find healthy ways to reduce stress today?
• L - Love and connect.
  • Did I meaningfully connect with someone today?
• E - Eat to nourish.
  • Did I choose foods that nourish my body?

The event featured real-time tips from nurse residents, and students were encouraged to identify personal strategies used to prevent stress, with all given the opportunity to gather snacks and prizes.

Although the team was not sure at first how engaged students would be, interest was overwhelming. More than two hundred students attended the first pop-up event, with 93% indicating they found the pop up helpful in learning stress-prevention tactics. The team also took the time to survey students on future interests: 67% requested anxiety as a future topic followed by depression, self-care, sleep, and social media use.

Once You Pop Up You Can’t Stop: Subsequent Events

Throughout 2022 to 2023, the NGNR program held two additional pop-ups: The first on self-care and the second on sleep promotion. They once again tapped into the SMILE Scale and included an activity with large yard dice—each one corresponding to a SMILE Scale component. The sleep promotion pop up held in December 2023 included an engagement activity where youth put green or red stickers on what they were doing well or could improve for optimal sleep. As incentives for participation, they offered more avocado stress balls along with sleep masks.

In total, they had 800+ student interactions across these three events, and each event increased in attendance. The NPD team shared participants were once again eager to engage and many remembered them from the previous semester.

Since the ANPD Aspire Convention, the team held a healthy eating pop up in spring 2024 and have plans to host one in the fall as well.

Kyle Kick, executive director of B Strong Together, shared his perspective on the event’s success: “The pop-up created a low-pressure, yet highly engaging way, for the nurses to interact with hundreds of students in a short period of time around critical messages supporting student physical and mental health. The visits have been a wonderful benefit to our students and the survey responses following each event have provided valuable information about student concerns and interest for future event planning and additional resources and messaging shared with the school community.”

Takeaways & Future Implications

The NPD team outlined key learnings from their time doing the pop-up events so far:

• Keep it simple. The team did not have a lot of time to work with each individual student. They found scripting talking points helped with this. They suggest: “Go where they are at and make it quick and impactful.”
• Crowd control. Optimize flow and be agile to accommodate large groups. Whatever you are doing, try to think about how to optimize and be agile.
• School support. To make the event a success, the team partnered with the school’s health and wellness coordinator. Working alongside the student advisory group was clearly also a game changer for the final event concept.
• Brand recognition. The hospital leveraged the event as a branding opportunity with tablecloths and t-shirts. The NPD team specifically had the nurses dress casually to increase the connection between nurse and student.

 For future projects, the NPD team hopes to continue improving:

• Student application: What type of call to action can accelerate behavioral change that will help students lead happy, healthy lives?
• Audience expansion: Having a connection with B Strong, and in turn its connection to a school, helped this pop-up event be successful. This connection helped eliminate barriers to gaining access to students in their everyday learning environment. They want to continue seeking this level of support so they can expand to other areas of the community.
• Nurse representation: The program is nurse resident-driven, and they hope to offer opportunities for more nurse residents to participate.  In addition, the NGNR offers an optional NGNR Rewards Program, which allows nurse residents to collect reward points in and out of the program, including participating in program-supported outreach opportunities such as the pop ups. Nurse residents can collect points to earn prizes ranging from goody bags to MLB and major concert tickets.

Overall, the NPD team at Advocate Health (Midwest Region) successfully created a new, inspiring program that engages new nurse residents as well as local students—improving social determinants of health for participants. All nurses understand the value of programs that engage diverse populations in such successful ways. A key takeaway? Leverage population perspectives—imagine that empty library if the student board had not been consulted!

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References

• Bigott, V., Jensen, L., & Zidek, S. (2023). Hackathons: Practical problem-solving for nurse educators. American Journal of Nursing, 123(7), 48-52. American Journal of Nursing.
• Feeg, V., Mancino, D. & Kret, D. (2022). First job workplace stressors for new nurse graduates in their own words: A secondary analysis. National League for Nursing.  43(1): 30-4. doi: 10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000000894
• Glynn, D.M., Cook, M.C., Cullen, M.L., Landers, E. R. (2022).  Transition to pandemic: reality shock and role development for the novice nurse. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing. 53(12), 557-564
• Harper, M. G. & Maloney, P. (Eds). (2022). Nursing professional development: Scope & standards of practice (4th ed.). Association for Nursing Professional Development
• Markaki, A., Prajankett, O., Shorten, A., Shirley, M.R., & Harper, D.C. (2021). Academic service-learning nursing partnerships in the Americas: a scoping review. BMC Nursing. 20(179), 1-15
• Snyder, B.L., Doran, K., & Doede, M. (2022). Nursing students’ perceptions of a communication health street outreach experience: Thematic analysis. The Journal of Nursing Education. 61(7), 394-397
• Solomon, J. (2021). Going above and beyond: using nursing theories to explore volunteerism during the COVID-19 pandemic. British Journal of Nursing. 30(21). 1238-1240
• The Smile Scale. March 30, 2023. https://www.lauravater.com/smile-scale