Staff Educator's Guide to Clinical Orientation, Third Edition

Robin Jarvis (b. 1963) spent most of his school years in art rooms. After a degree course in graphic design, he worked in television, making models and puppets. One evening, while doodling, he began inventing names and stories for his drawings, and thus began his writing career. His first book, The Depford Mice (1989), established Jarvis as a bestselling children’s author. Jarvis came up with the story for Thorn Ogres of Hagwood while on a forest hike, when he heard a racket up in the trees and saw two squirrels chasing each other. He suddenly thought that perhaps only one of them was a real squirrel and the other an imposter, and so the werling creatures were born. Jarvis has been shortlisted for numerous awards, and won the Lancashire Libraries Children’s Book of the Year Award. One of his trilogies, Tales from the Wyrd Museum, was on a list of books recommended by then–British Prime Minister Tony Blair for dads to read with their sons. He lives in Greenwich, London, and still makes model monsters, mostly on the computer.

Amy J. Word-Allen, BSN, RN, is currently employed with HCA Healthcare in the emergency department. She has two years of burn center experience with pediatric and adult patients. She worked in the pediatric critical-care unit at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University, where she served as a clinical staff nurse, primary preceptor, unit board president, primary/secondary preceptor, charge nurse, interim assistant manager, and on the education committee. Word-Allen worked in onboarding roles, serving on the board interviewing pediatric nursing residents and experienced staff nurses, conducting peer interviews, and developing didactic classroom orientation content. She also developed guidelines for primary preceptors and presentations for educators to utilize during orientation for HCA Healthcare, Avalon Hospice, and TrustPoint Behavioral Health Hospital. Word-Allen has worked as adjunct faculty for Tennessee Tech University as the Pediatric Clinical Professor and in the pediatric ICUat the Children's Hospital at TriStar Centennial in Nashville, Tennessee, where she served as lead preceptor/mentor, developed the clinical orientation for the PICU with managers, and served as a charge nurse. She developed teaching materials and presented in the skills fair for the continuing education of all the pediatric nurses within the organization. Word-Allen built a mentoring program to pair orientees with coworkers to provide support during the first year of employment. During her time as a lead preceptor, she also served as one of four primary preceptors on the unit. She has facilitated multiple orientation experiences for staff nurses and has developed strategies to help preceptors teach and connect deeper to their orientees. Word-Allen has worked in multiple roles in the process of precepting and mentoring. She has spent over 3,250 hours facilitating orientation and developing learning materials and precepting staff during her 20 years in the nursing profession.

Alvin D. Jeffery, PhD, RN, CCRN, FNP-BC, is an Assistant Professor of Nursing and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he studies how informatics solutions can help with clinical decision-making. Before pursuing a full-time research career, Jeffery worked as the unit-based educator in a pediatric intensive care unit (ICU) at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. During this time as an educator, Jeffery finished his master of science in nursing degree with a focus as a family nurse practitioner. He has been board-certified in both Nursing Professional Development (American Nurses Credentialing Center) and Pediatric Critical-Care Nursing (American Association of Critical-Care Nurses), and he has developed and instructed internal review courses for both of these certifications. Jeffery has facilitated several internal inservices/continuing education programs in various aspects of nursing professional and staff development and has served as a preceptor for several new educators in the pediatric ICU. He has collaborated with almost every department to help organize, design, and develop various staff development projects including, but not limited to, competency assessment tools, education record management databases, simulation implementation, and preceptor development. He is one of the authors of this book's earlier editions as well as the Staff Educator's Guide to ProfessionalDevelopment.