Examples of Nursing Goals for Yearly Evaluation Reports

Healthcare organizations measure nursing performance and efficiency by conducting yearly evaluation reports for each employee. In these reports, clinical managers are tasked with developing professional goals for each clinician. Some facility leaders find this formal administrative process stressful and time consuming. Others claim that they don’t have enough time or creativity to craft goals and recommendations unique to each nurse on their team.
In this article, we’ll provide examples of nursing goals for yearly evaluation reports to guide you through the process and make the experience meaningful for everyone on your team. We’ll also list strategies you can use to encourage your employees to meet these annual goals.
What Are Annual Nursing Evaluation Reports?
Nursing evaluation reports are conducted once a year by clinical managers in charge of nursing teams. In these reports, clinicians are rated on their ability to demonstrate key nursing skills and abilities like:
- Professionalism
- Teamwork abilities
- Cultural competence
- Leadership skills
- Documentation accuracy
- Clinical confidence
- Time management
The primary objective of annually reviewing a nurse’s performance is to support staff morale by showing them how well they’re meeting organizational benchmarks. However, these reports also exist to motivate and inspire clinicians to improve their professional practice.
Clinical managers are required to develop a set of goals for each clinician to support their personal career aspirations. They also share goals that can help the team achieve the mission and vision of the organization as a whole. Examples of nursing goals for yearly evaluation reports include earning an advanced degree, pursuing professional development opportunities, and advancing clinical competence.
Why Are Nursing Evaluation Reports Helpful for Facilities?
Nursing evaluation reports can help foster curiosity and innovation within your clinical team. They can also help you develop a strong company culture where professionalism and accountability are celebrated, not feared. Clinical managers who develop strong nurse evaluation goals for each employee can also optimize team performance by:
- Boosting employee engagement.
- Improving job satisfaction and retention.
- Enhancing clinical improvement efforts.
What Are the Challenges Associated With Developing Evaluation Goals?
Nursing performance evaluation and goal setting are essential to improving an organization’s clinical operations. Unfortunately, these reports have become a “check-the-box” task for many managers. The completion of these forms can take a great deal of time and effort, which many managers believe could be better spent on other important administrative tasks.
Additionally, some clinical managers are directly responsible for hundreds of clinicians, which can make it challenging to develop a genuine professional relationship with each employee. In situations where managers and clinicians don’t have frequent interaction, evaluation report goals and comments are often generic and lack real depth and meaning.
Examples of Nursing Goals for Yearly Evaluation Reports
Clinical managers need to create unique clinical goals and performance comments for each nurse to make the evaluation process effective. Below, we’ll review examples of nursing goals for yearly evaluation reports to get you started on the right track.
1. Build upon current interprofessional communication skills to improve patient reporting abilities during clinical rounds.
Effective communication is an essential skill for all healthcare providers. When looking for examples of SMART nursing goals for yearly evaluation reports, improving interprofessional communication during bedside rounds is a great objective for every clinician. While this goal is especially helpful for new graduates with limited bedside experience, seasoned nurses should also continue to practice having difficult conversations and advocating for patient needs.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Familiarize staff with the SBAR communication protocol.
- Host simulation exercises for nurses to practice having difficult conversations with patients, family members, and coworkers.
- Develop a healthy communication toolkit for employee reference.
2. Improve time-management skills to streamline treatment efficiency and reduce care delay.
If you’re completing a report for a staff nurse, examples of nursing goals for yearly evaluations like this one can help your team directly improve care quality. Time management is an essential nursing skill and can be learned only through experience. This goal is particularly useful for nurse graduates or clinicians who are new to a particular specialty.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Allow clinicians to practice charting away from the patient care environment.
- Encourage nurses to reach out for assistance or support during a difficult shift.
- Host seminars for experienced nurses to share their strategies for hitting clinical benchmarks and targets.
3. Prioritize professional development by becoming certified.
Looking to strengthen your brand image? Staffing a team of qualified and certified nurses can help you build trust between your clinical team and the patients they serve. Also, encouraging your team to become clinical experts in their area of practice can get your organization one step closer to meeting your goals.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Host certification review classes.
- Cover the cost of the nurse’s certification examination.
- Offer an hourly bonus or monthly pay differential for all earned certifications.
4. Develop leadership skills by taking on additional clinical duties and responsibilities.
Fostering leadership and teamwork skills is essential to improving your team’s care quality. You’ll want to tailor nursing short-term goal examples like this one to suit your unit’s specialty and patient population. For example, if you manage an intensive care unit, you can encourage your nurse to become trained in clinical transport. If you lead an outpatient surgical department, you can encourage your nurse to become a subject matter expert on a device or piece of equipment.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Encourage participation in nursing shared governance councils.
- Assign the nurse to positions like charge nurse or team leader.
- Enroll the nurse in a mentorship or preceptorship class.
5. Work toward improving patient outcomes by participating in quality-improvement initiatives.
Examples of smart nursing goals for yearly evaluations like this are relevant to almost every practicing nurse, regardless of their specialty or level of experience. All hospitals work toward optimizing health outcomes and look for ways to improve care practices.
By encouraging participation in clinical research, you can demonstrate to your employees that changing healthcare policies and guidelines starts at the bedside. You can also foster a sense of clinical inquiry among team members, which can improve engagement and job satisfaction.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Provide paid time to work on unit-based research projects outside of scheduled shifts.
- Encourage nurses to identify care deficiencies and share ideas for removing barriers to safe care.
- Form a clinical improvement team to plan and execute evidence-based practice projects.
6. Stay up-to-date on state licensure and continuing education requirements.
While this performance appraisal for staff nurse samplegoal might seem generic, it shows that you trust your nursing team to manage their own professional practice. It’s normal for an administrative team to help your clinicians keep track of their credential expiration dates. However, it should ultimately be the nurse’s responsibility to make sure they meet the requirements for licensure renewal.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Educate nurses on the rules outlined in your state nurse practice act (NPA).
- Send automated reminders to remind nurses of their pending license expiration date.
- Provide free continuing education credits to aid clinicians in meeting their licensure requirements.
7. Refine teaching and leadership skills by developing a cultural competency training program.
As cultural and racial diversity expands, nurses in all specialties need to know how to provide sensitive and compassionate care to individuals of different backgrounds. Encourage nurses to develop a training course for their coworkers to show them that you value their insights and trust them to create a course that’s accurate and informative. Clinicians who feel empowered to take an active role in improving care quality to underrepresented groups can also support diversity and inclusion in the workplace.
Ideas for Supporting Clinician Success:
- Assist the nurse in collecting data on the cultural backgrounds of the patients you serve.
- Encourage participation in your organization’s DEI council.
- Provide tuition reimbursement for a nurse to attend a diversity, equity, and inclusion course.
Discover More Ways to Support Your Clinical Team
After reading through our examples of nursing goals for yearly evaluation reports, you’ll be able to complete your annual nurse evaluations in a way that’s helpful and meaningful to everyone. Looking for additional strategies to motivate and inspire your clinicians? Check out more of our expert-written tips for boosting nursing performance, resilience, and engagement.