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Leading Healthcare Organizations
Say Goodbye to Binders, Emails, and Spreadsheets
Disconnected papers, files, and emails are a thing of the past. Kahuna brings all of your data into one digitized platform so you can engage your nursing staff, report on progress, reward clinicians for their hard work, support your Magnet® Journey, and ensure the highest quality of care. How does your current method of tracking career development stack up?
Traditional Clinical Ladder
- Manually track progress and certifications across disparate files
- Restrict access to data based on its physical location
- Update records with manual paperwork, requiring multiple steps
- Limit data visibility for nurses, managers, and supervisors
- Waste valuable time compiling and analyzing data for actionable reports
- Reduce engagement with a lack of transparency and interactivity
- Rely on paper records to pull reports when needed for audits
Digitized Clinical Ladder in Kahuna
- Automatically track progress and certifications in one single system
- Access data anytime, anywhere in a secure platform
- Update clinical ladder profiles as activities are completed in a few clicks
- Share data effortlessly between nurses, managers, and supervisors
- Generate comprehensive, custom, and actionable program reports
- Enhance program transparency, approachability, and engagement
- Pull real-time, accurate data for audits quickly and efficiently
Level Up Your Nursing Clinical Ladder Program
Nursing clinical ladder and professional advancement programs are a core tenant of recognizing the hard work and dedication your nursing staff provides throughout your health system. With Kahuna’s all-in-one digitized competency management and clinical ladder software, you can provide a seamless and more engaging competency development experience from onboarding and beyond, benefitting your nurses, leaders, health system, and community.
Provide A Seamless Competency Experience
Track all skills, assessment, and development data in one system, ensuring your nurses get credit for their achievements throughout their development.
Remove the Confusing Paper Trail
Give your nurses all resources in one quick and accessible location. Throughout their journey, all documentation can be uploaded in one place to keep track of achievements, comments, and feedback.
Grow Your Clinical Ladder Program
Make career advancement more accessible across your health system. Nurses can easily see expectations, connect with mentors, receive feedback, and access resources—all at the click of a button.
Get Real-Time Reporting and Analytics
Sync data across your competency and career path programs for a comprehensive view of individual, unit, or system-level metrics. Customize dashboards to track proficiency, certifications, and engagement, while easily highlighting key metrics for audits and Magnet® reporting.
Understand Engagement
Track eligibility, participation, and progress to spot high-performing units, boost engagement, and identify employees needing support.
Provide Quality, Evidence-Based Care
Invest in your nursing staff to continue improving community health. Empowered nurses will stay at your health system, providing adaptable, high-quality patient care that meets industry, regulatory, and patient health needs.
Retain and Reward Nurses
Empower nurses with clear development opportunities and educational guidance. Recognizing their hard work boosts satisfaction and retention, keeping skilled nurses in your health system.
Support Your Magnet® Journey
Foster an environment where nurses feel valued and motivated to grow in their careers. Retaining highly skilled nurses not only improves patient outcomes, but strengthens a culture of excellence and innovation.
See Kahuna's Clinical Ladder In Action
Ready to see how a digitized clinical ladder can transform your nursing team’s growth and development? Request a demo today and experience firsthand how Kahuna makes career advancement and competency management seamless and efficient!
Frequently Asked Questions About Nursing Clinical Ladders
What is a clinical ladder?
A clinical ladder is a professional development model used in nursing to help guide nurses in their career journeys while working in the clinical setting. It has multiple levels, each with specific skill, experience, and educational requirements. Clinical ladders enhance engagement and provide transparent opportunities for advancement in nursing.
What are the levels of the clinical ladder in nursing?
A clinical ladder supports different levels of nursing career development and advancement. These levels include Novice, Advanced Beginner, Competent, Proficient, and Expert.
- Novice: Nurse has little or no experience in specific tasks or situations expected of them.
- Advanced Beginner: Nurse demonstrates acceptable performance and is beginning to connect prior experience with actual situations.
- Competent: Nurse has at least 2 to 3 years of experience and uses conscious, analytic planning for efficient, organized, and confident care.
- Proficient: Nurse views situations holistically, has learned from experience, is capable of recognizing typical events, and uses strategic decision-making to adapt plans if needed to care for a patient.
- Expert: Nurse is highly experienced, and intuitively understands each clinical situation to perform flexibly and proficiently in familiar or unfamiliar situations.
What is a clinical ladder program in nursing?
A clinical ladder program in nursing is a structured system that provides clear pathways for nursing professional development. Advancement is based on a nurse’s skills, experiences, education, and contributions to patient care. These programs included multiple levels of achievement, each with specific critera to be met for a nurse to advance to the next level.
What are the benefits of the clinical ladder in healthcare?
For nurses and healthcare systems, clinical ladders provide many benefits:
- Transparent professional development and career advancement
- Nurse recognition and appreciation for contributions, expertise, and experiences
- Engaged nursing staff, and increased retention and talent acquisition
- Increased quality of care with a skilled and knowledgeable staff
- Supported culture of excellence in the journey to achieving or maintaining Magnet status
How do you digitize a clinical ladder?
Digitizing a nursing clinical ladder is best done by implementing a software program. This eliminates the disparate emails, files, paperwork, and PDFs used in traditional, paper-based clinical ladder programs to track nurse accomplishments and clinical ladder progression.
Leveraging technology like Kahuna’s all-in-one competency management and clinical ladder software helps you create structured, accessible, and efficient processes for competency management and professional development in one streamlined place for your nurses, managers, and healthcare system. Learn more about digitizing your clinical ladder program with Kahuna.
What are some ways digitalization helps nurses climb the clinical ladder?
Digitizing a clinical ladder increases the ease of use, accessibility, transparency, engagement, and visibility of the program across the health system. With digital access:
- Nurses can stay organized with all documents centralized in one place, monitor their progress, see feedback easily, and receive automated reminders to stay on track
- Managers can streamline the evaluation process, provide timely feedback, and be more involved in developing staff with better visibility into progress and enhanced communication with nurses
- Organizations can improve efficiency by tracking development progress, enhancing how data is managed and used, better allocating resources based on training and development, and increasing nurse engagement and satisfaction at the health system
Learn More About Kahuna's Competency Solution
Watch our competency management demo series to learn how digitizing competencies can automate onboarding and orientation, enable nurse mobility, help your system pass regulatory surveys and audits easily, and support professional growth and development.