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Nurse Performance Feedback: Your Roadmap to Meaningful Training
Posted by AdminNEWS, Nurse Education6:35 PM
How do you decide what professional training would best meet your development needs? Do you follow recommendations from
colleagues, requests from your manager, your own intuition…? Training and development are powerful career advancers, because
they build new skills, open up new career directions, and make you a better nursing professional. But choosing how best to spend
your training time is not always an easy decision – you have to balance skill needs, career ambitions, and even management and
professional expectations.
The formal performance feedback you get on-the-job, is a great source of information to help guide your training decisions. That
feedback can become a roadmap for your personalized training and development plan.
For nurses, formal performance feedback comes in many different forms:
Annual Performance Appraisals – this usually addresses generic skills such as communication, organization, working with others,
etc.
Peer Reviews – whether you have a formal or informal peer review process, performance feedback from peers can be powerful
because it comes from those who work closest with you, sometimes even treating the same patients. Ideally the work environment at your
facility promotes constructive peer feedback and does not penalize the person being evaluated.
Competency Assessments – usually a formal process where selected professional skills are evaluated. In the U.S., facilities must do
these assessments to maintain regulatory (such as Joint Commission) accreditation. Done well, competency assessments can identify
technical skill strengths and weaknesses and provide you with performance feedback.
Individually each form of feedback gives you “a nugget” of information about your performance. But to make effective decisions
about training requirements you need a broader view; so all this feedback needs to be consolidated. For example, your supervisor
might have given you several compliments about how well you communicate procedure information to patients. On its own this
feedback might lead you to believe you are a good communicator. However, peer review feedback might indicate others’ frustration
with end-of-shift patient data transfer – your peers may feel you are not communicating well and this might be holding you back
from a desired promotion. Viewing all the feedback as an aggregate helps you better determine your specific training needs.
It is only by considering all of your feedback together that get you a balanced view of your performance, which is powerful
information for making smart, targeted training decisions. For instance the feedback might reveal an unknown strength that, with
some training, would help you advance or transfer to a different specialty. Alternatively, performance feedback might reveal some
unknown weaknesses that if improved would create new opportunities.
Once you understand your strengths and weaknesses, selecting training courses is easy because you have the performance feedback
to make fact based decisions and get the highest value from your training. Many facilities have a learning management system that
helps you identify specific training activities available. The ideal system is integrated with your performance management
system/process, so you can search for learning activities based on competencies, skills, interests and performance.
Halogen Software is the industry leading provider for online nursing competency assessments, development plans and
performance management. To learn more about our performance management solutions for nurses, visit our website:
http://www.halogensoftware.com
Source:
Article: UltimateNurse.com
Photo Credit: Internetphilippines.com
http://www.pinoynurseinfo.com/2010/05/nurse-performance-feedback-your-roadmap.html
