The Challenge
- Segment: Large academic health system
- Industry: Healthcare
- Location: United States, with hospitals in several states
- Programs: Nurse residency mentoring, career mentoring for nursing staff
A large academic health system offers nursing mentoring across more than a dozen hospitals in several states. Some nurses work on busy campuses surrounded by experienced colleagues. Others work at small, isolated sites where there may be no one nearby to ask. Informal mentoring tends to happen where people already know each other, so nurses at the smaller sites had fewer chances to find a mentor.
The nurse residency program added a responsibility of its own. It supports more than 900 newly qualified nurses a year through the move into practice, a number the health system expects to grow. The residency is required to offer mentoring, while taking part stays voluntary for each nurse.
Before the current approach, residency mentoring was small: only a handful of people took part. Nursing needed a repeatable way to introduce mentoring, connect interested nurses and support each relationship, without every match depending on what an individual administrator happened to know. Alongside the residency, nursing also wanted a broader career mentoring track open to any nurse who wants to grow.
Why Chronus
For the nursing education team, the first value is reach. Mentoring should be available beyond the local pockets where it already happens on its own.
The benefit of the platform is that we can reach our small, isolated sites that don't have this option.
Nursing education specialist
The two programs needed different ways in. Residency administrators invite eligible nurses and assign them the mentee role, while nurses enroll themselves in career mentoring. Matching can reflect a nurse's location or specialty, so each program organizes connections around its own needs.
Administrators also wanted less routine work and a clear view of how relationships progress. The team describes the matching workload as taken off its plate, and residency administrators can follow progress and evaluations as part of the program's mentoring responsibilities.
The Solution
Mentoring built into the residency
Before each residency class, administrators send invitations so nurses can complete their profiles. A nursing education specialist introduces mentoring during class, and each resident decides whether to take part. When residents finish the program, the team invites them to become mentors for the next group, so each class helps support the one that follows.
Local choices inside one shared program
Matching follows local needs. Some regions match residents by location, and some specialty services match within their own field. One regional team sends its own mentee invitations inside the shared residency track.
Oversight can be delegated too. One specialty unit's segment held around 40 people, the large majority of them mentors, and a unit moderator was given access limited to that segment to handle local invitations and keep an eye on activity.
Automation with a human check
Routine invitations and connections run automatically, and the residency administrator steps in on exceptions. If a pairing is not a good fit, the administrator can close it so the nurse can choose someone else. The team has also switched on certificates, with close to 30 in progress at a recent count.
The Impact
The nursing team combined records of completed mentoring connections with HR data to see whether participants stayed with the health system and whether they moved into other roles. That review, and the platform's own records, show:
- 93% or more retention among residency mentoring completers
- Above 90% retention among career mentoring completers
- More than 45 residency mentoring enrollments in each of two recent quarters, a level the team describes as holding steady
- More than 20 people fully matched and taking part in residency mentoring at an early checkpoint
Progress tracking and evaluations help the residency team understand its mentoring relationships, and the team has written about its standardized approach to mentoring in residency reaccreditation materials. For individual stories, the team also reaches out to mentoring pairs directly.
Our residency mentoring program has better matching and better tracking with Chronus than we had before.
Nursing education specialist, nurse residency
Nurses can now move through a structured residency pathway, then come back as mentors for the next class. Across nursing, the team offers mentoring beyond local networks, while keeping location and specialty choices in how people connect.
