Orienting the Newbie: A Subspecialty Team's Guide to Building Confident, Competent Flight Personnel

How does your orientation process look? Do you see orientation graduates entering their new profession with a healthy combination of confidence and humility? Or are you losing orientees to "failure to progress?" The lack of standardization across the healthcare industry, and especially within the air-medical transport community, has resulted in a wide variety of orientation methodologies. Not all are successful in bridging the gap between written curricula and bedside acumen. After several years of investigation, inquiries (and a little trial-and-error), the Children'sOne Flight program developed a 5-Phased orientation process that not only expedited the orientation process, but also left both our orientees and our preceptors more confident and satisfied with the system.

In this session, we explore the existing literature supporting best-practices in orientation processes and discuss the successes and opportunities in our experience developing the Children'sOne Flight orientation process. In discussing the results, we have realized the direction we intend to pursue and we hope to inspire you to examine your own process.