Should You Hire a Nursing Professional Development Specialist?
Quality patient care requires an organizational commitment to continuous education and professional growth. For many facilities, Nursing Professional Development Specialists (NPDSs) play a central role in this effort, developing and overseeing staff orientation, training, and educational measures. Their expertise can elevate learning from routine healthcare competencies to targeted strategies for ensuring better, safer patient care.
If you’re considering adding an NPDS to your nursing education team, this article provides an informative overview to assist with your decision-making. From examples of nurse professional development specialist-led programs to balanced considerations of the role’s organizational advantages (and potential drawbacks), you’ll find key insights to ensure you make the best hiring decision.
What Is a Nursing Professional Development Specialist’s Primary Focus?
The overarching purpose of the NPDS is to drive nursing excellence through enrichment opportunities that strengthen clinical skills and knowledge. An NPDS may achieve this primary function by:
- Promoting research and evidence-based practice and policies.
- Developing and maintaining clinical standards and competencies.
- Designing and overseeing staff training and education.
- Onboarding and cross-training personnel.
- Supporting quality improvement initiatives and methodology.
Because healthcare practice is constantly evolving, none of the role’s functions are a one-time organizational fix. Instead, they’re progressive, ideally aligning with regulatory and research-driven shifts.
Nursing Professional Development Specialist Programs
An NPDS guides nurses through structured frameworks, serving as an academic and clinical educator in addition to mentor. Their influence brings expertise to those programs, as demonstrated by the professional development nursing examples listed below.
New Employee Orientation
The orientation structure and rollout is overseen by the NPDS, who monitors feedback and clinical adjustments to continuously improve the program for smoother transitions.
Example: Employees who onboarded from different organizations later reported struggling with mismatched emergency codes, causing delays in response time. The NPDS integrates a forum on facility-specific code designations (and expectations) to address this significant patient safety issue.
Ongoing Education
Specialists design and deliver continuous education opportunities for staff, ensuring that practice is informed by the latest research and regulatory-backed standards.
Example: Responding to new research, an NPDS integrates the practice of chlorhexidine gluconate baths perioperatively. Evidence is provided to nursing staff during educational sessions, highlighting how this can help infection rates. Charting audits are then implemented to help enforce the new peri-surgical practice standard.
Staff Competencies
Similar to education, staff training must be ongoing to ensure standards maintenance and competency. Nursing professional development specialist training expectations include planning, delivery, management, and evaluation.
Example: A healthcare facility has acquired new glucometer devices. The NPDS is responsible for developing introductory lessons and ensuring staff competency around the new point of care testing. When staff signal difficulty after the device’s rollout, the NPDS overhauls the training to target the staff-specified challenges, redesigning the competency checklist to guarantee proficiency.
Cross Training and Transitions
NPD specialists assist with nurse transitions from one care environment to another, facilitating their skill and knowledge growth to meet the needs of the new patient population.
Example: A rehab nurse transitions to a renal specialty hospital unit. The NPDS develops a simulation training event to help nurses get hands-on experience administering peritoneal dialysis before their clinical check-offs with real patients. This helps create a smoother, safer transition between care environments.
Quality Improvement
The NPDS focus is always nursing excellence. Therefore they must maintain awareness of quality improvement data, using identified patterns or trends to better target educational (or training) needs.
Example: A facility’s catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) quality indicator data shows a concerning upward trend. Working with the quality improvement team, the NPDS designs and delivers a new catheter care educational module, implementing new practice standards to improve patient safety.
NPDS: Advantages vs. Disadvantages
As with any specialty position, the NPDS offers organizations a range of benefits alongside potential challenges. Below are some key, broadly applicable considerations; however, these pros and cons may differ across facility types.
| Stronger Skillsets: Expert-led educational and training opportunities can facilitate and strengthen nursing professional growth.
Better Patient Outcomes: An NPDS targets educational efforts to provide better, evidence-based standards. These (alongside honed skillsets) are tied to safer care delivery and better patient outcomes. Standardization: By employing a specialist, NPD programs are guided by strategic, unified leadership. This standardization guarantees better continuity of staff abilities and knowledge. |
Costs: Professionals qualified to fill NPDS roles often bring vast experience and credentialing, requiring compensation that matches their expertise.
Operational Disconnect: Because NPDSs work for the facility rather than a department or unit, lack of familiarity may pose accessibility or buy-in challenges among the staff they’re trying to influence. Timeliness: Many of the benefits associated with an NPDS are long term, meaning that the benefit of their hire may take time to become measurably beneficial. |
Takeaways:
Given the advantages (and disadvantages) of hiring an NPDS, the facilities that may benefit most from their addition include:
- Those with high patient volume (like a moderate-to-large hospital) that can afford a highly-qualified professional development specialist.
- Organizations that frequently hire new staff (or utilize contract nurses).
- Healthcare settings that engage in innovative care practices and cutting edge technologies.
- Facilities that offer diverse nursing care (requiring assistance with standardization and frequent cross-training).
Nurse Professional Training Specialists: Additional Hiring Considerations
Hiring an NPD specialist is a good way to ensure continuity across care delivery and practice standards while pursuing long term organizational goals. If you’re committed to nursing excellence and have the budget and infrastructure to support this valuable, quality-driven team member, here are a few more considerations to help direct your candidate search.
1. Nursing Professional Development Specialist Certification
Although certification is not a requirement for the position, it signals an expertise that may translate to more immediate beneficial hiring outcomes. Their skills are not only verified, but solidified, by this accreditation.
Tip: If you’re looking to fill your NPDS vacancies quickly, consider opening the position to non-certified nurses but with the clear qualification that they will obtain NPD certification within an appropriate (typically two to three years) timeframe post hire.
2. Clinical Education Experience
Becoming a NPD specialist requires significant experience. Those who are certified need a minimum of 2,000 hours of experience (within the previous 3-year period leading up to the test). As you filter through resumes and candidate applications, consider not only how much professional development experience a potential hire has had, but also the types.
Tip: Check for relevant professional experience from facilities that either align with your current staffing growth needs, or (better yet) your projected nursing development goals.
3. Highest Level of Earned Nursing Degree
To become certified as a specialist, candidates must have a baccalaureate nursing degree (at a minimum). Depending on the breadth of your programs, a master’s degree or higher may be indicated.
Tip: Consider making graduate degrees beyond a bachelor’s a preferred hiring qualification to avoid losing candidates who have vast clinical education experience but lack academic training beyond the required four-year degree.
Want More Strategies to Tackle Your Clinical and Organizational Goals?
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