Versant® is committed to a future where all health care providers will experience the proven benefits of the Versant Competency-Based System. Patient safety is our ultimate goal and ensuring every caregiver is proven competent at the point-of-care must be an essential part of a unified and structured framework within nursing education. As such, we at Versant are continually engaged in the development of new residencies and fellowships. Our most recent offering, the Versant Advanced Practice Registered Nurse Fellowship™ (VAPRNF™) was just released in January. Although we are already deep into our next development cycle, we wanted to share with you the processes involved in development of a Versant fellowship, in this case, the VAPRNF.
Before a single competency is developed, we begin by identifying a need. The 2010 Institute of Medicine (IOM)’s Future of Nursing Report called for the implementation of Transition-To-Practice programs for nurse practitioners (NPs) after they had completed an advanced degree program. As approximately 23,000 NPs graduate in a given year[1], this recommendation affects broad parts of the nursing ecosystem – including hospitals, physician groups, and clinics. Our partners in academia and health care agreed, and we began our work. How could we ensure competence in performance of a role without a comprehensive understanding of what defines the role?
Versant identified a job analysis as the critical next step in the development of transition-to-practice programs. Then, as do now, we searched the country to find professionals in the relevant fields, hired them as subject matter experts to participate in our short term meetings, arranged in a central location. In these sessions, as a group, we can identify and develop the competencies required for consistent performance at the highest levels; the performance criteria of that role. In this case, our job analysis occurred early in October, 2017, in San Antonio, Texas – attendees of our annual Client Conference may have observed the participants in action a few rooms down from their meeting. Spread out in two large conference rooms, our expert group of APRNs worked with members of Versant’s team to thoroughly analyze the APRN role.
It was amazing to have so much combined APRN experience in one room – and to see so many people working so hard to ensure new APRNs had a framework for success in their role. With the newly developed competency profiles in hand, Versant can then initiate the rest of the development cycle. If you’d like to participate in a Versant Job Analysis, please check our job postings on a regular basis.
For more information on our development process, stay tuned!
