Nursing professional development (NPD) practitioners are often overtasked and underresourced. Frequently, there is barely enough time to meet the developmental needs of nursing staff and newly licensed nurses, let alone complete large-scale research projects. However, it is vital that NPD practitioners take the time to review available, current, research articles and find the highest level of evidence to guide practice. This is especially crucial when developing or updating transition to practice or nurse residency programs. Nurses who are committed to and passionate about providing the evidence to support our NPD practice, such as nurse residency researchers, should be celebrated! Dr. Mary Lynn is one of those researchers, and she is conducting a large study related to nurse residency programs. This column provides information about Dr. Lynn, and it outlines some of the challenges she has faced in conducting a national study.

Dr. May Lynn has been a nurse for 47 years, originally educated in a diploma program at Orange Memorial Hospital (now Orlando Regional Medical Center). She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing and the PhD in Psychometrics and Evaluation from the University of Florida. Since then, Dr. Lynn has served as a faculty member at the University of Mississippi and the University of Arizona before coming to the School of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has been on the faculty for 27 years. For most of her career, Dr. Lynn has taught undergraduate research methods, undergraduate statistics, master's-level research methods and statistics, and PhD-level measurement. Recently, Dr. Lynn initiated a DNP program course on data analysis for students in the systems track of the program.

1. What is your clinical and teaching background?

ML: I worked almost exclusively in pediatric clinical areas, which led to my creating and teaching a pediatric master's-level program in my first full-time teaching position at the University of Mississippi School of Nursing. However, when I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship, studying with Ada Sue Hinshaw, PhD, RN, at the University of Arizona College of Nursing, I changed my focus to the area of my dissertation research-professional socialization in nursing-and never looked back, albeit with a right turn along the way.

2. Are you still working in that area?

ML: While I would love to say yes, about the time I finished my postdoctoral fellowship, it became clear that funding for those types of studies had disappeared. This was about the time that it was necessary in almost all nursing research to link the study to patient outcomes; professional socialization was not sufficiently developed to meet that expectation. I moved to the area of defining and measuring quality of care, which has generally been my focus over the past 30 years. However, I am as interested in instrument development and testing, so I have worked in other areas related to quality care such as nurses' work satisfaction and patients' expectations for care.

3. How did you get interested in the study you are currently conducting?

ML: I have had the great fortune of being an evaluator for the Vizient Nurse Residency Program since 2004. The Vizient Nurse Residency Program was originally the University HealthSystem Consortium's Nurse Residency Program. University HealthSystem Consortium merged with VHA, the combined company becoming Vizient. The nurse residency program was begun as a collaboration between University HealthSystem Consortium and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing to address the high turnover rates of new graduate baccalaureate-prepared nurses in academic medical centers, where as much as 50% of the new graduates were leaving in their first year. When the program began in 2002, there were six initial institutional members. Although the nurse residency program continued to grow, other programs had also begun or were beginning-some multiple institutional programs (e.g., Versant) and any number of more "home-grown" programs. With the Institute of Medicine's publication of The Future of Nursing in 2011, residencies became a hot topic; they were either in place or under consideration at many U.S. hospitals (Institute of Medicine, 2011).

While institutions focus on putting a residency program in place, there is one huge issue: It is not known exactly what the program should contain, how long it should last, and what the optimum outcomes to use are in evaluating the program's graduates and the program itself.

My goal is to attempt to answer those questions.

4. What is the project you are currently conducting?

ML: This project has two phases: The first being an assessment of the current onboarding activities for new graduate registered nurses in U.S. hospitals, and the second being a 1-year study of new graduates in institutions with different types of onboarding selected from those participating in the first phase.

5. Who funded your current project?

ML: The National Council of State Boards of Nursing Center for Regulatory Excellence (2016) provided the funds for this project under their competitive grant program. Through this program, they fund "scientific research projects that advance the science of nursing policy and regulation and build regulatory expertise worldwide" (para. 1).

6. Where are you getting your participants?

ML: The original plan was to sample 25% of all U.S. hospitals and contact the person responsible for new graduate onboarding. That person would be asked to complete the survey, designed to gather all the information about their program, be it a residency program, a preceptor-based orientation, or any of a number of other configurations. What happened was basically that, despite the project staff having called more than 1,200 hospitals, identifying the correct person to contact was all but impossible. We received the necessary contact information for fewer than 5% of those called. Our only choice at that point was to send the contact information to the Chief Nursing Officer, with the hope that it would be forwarded to the correct person. That was a total failure.

We then turned to the Association for Nursing Professional Development (ANPD), purchasing their mailing list and sending the members an invitation to participate. We might have originally started with ANPD, but we were trying for a random sample of all U.S. hospitals-a goal we abandoned when our initial plan failed.

7. How much success did you have with your second approach to gathering subjects?

ML: We did receive considerably more responses from the ANPD members than we did from our initial approach, with about 10% of the ANPD membership participating. Of course, some of those members might be in the same institution (so only one response was warranted), and some do not work in the necessary position (e.g., academic-based members). Also, completion of the survey required some facts and figures about the institution that may have been a deterrent to participation.

8. What will you do to get ready for the second phase?

ML: With the advice of a 10-member advisory board, drawn from nurses responsible for onboarding new graduates, leaders of established residency programs, and academic educators who study new graduates, we will review the responses and try to classify the types of programs into categories we build from the responses. Then we will randomly sample institutions from those categories and contact them to see if they are willing to have us follow their new graduates for 1 year. New graduates will be asked to complete an online survey at the start of their employment and again at 6 and 12 months after that. New graduates will be paid for each survey completion, with a small bonus for completing all three surveys.

9. How do you think the results from this study can be used?

ML: The hope is that the results from this study can inform both the profession, at large, and those leading the onboarding of new graduates in exactly what is making a difference in new graduates' satisfaction and confidence, as well as their growth during that vital first year of employment.

MW: Dr. Lynn and her work should help to provide future evidence of why transition or nurse residency programs are needed. Her research will also help to provide the evidence NPD practitioners need to improve current programs. Moreover, it is interesting to hear of the trials and challenges in conducting a large, national study. Although, we may not always have time to conduct large research studies as Dr. Lynn is implementing, we can certainly appreciate her dedication and contribution to the specialty of nursing professional development.

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