Certified Nursing Assistants: How mentoring impacts a new hire's experience

High turnover rates among certified nursing assistants (CNAs) have been well documented in recent years. Although CNAs employed less than one year contribute significantly to turnover rates, with some positions turning over several times in one year, few studies examine what drives new-hire turnover. Identifying factors that lead to successful integration into the workforce is important in order to develop practices that stabilize the workforce and allow organizations to allocate resources towards their primary mission of providing quality care.

Certified nursing assistants entering a new workplace must learn how to fit into a new work culture and how to get along with coworkers and supervisors in addition to learning about the care needs of assigned residents. According to Susan Eaton in “Unloving care revisited,” (1999) “It's all about relationships.”

This study examined the first-year experiences of CNAs through interviews with 60 newly hired CNAs and 40 administrators, supervisors, and lead CNAs in five nursing homes and identified peer relationships to be important to new CNAs. Strong peer relationships foster better cooperation, teamwork and shorten the learning curve for new hires. When mentor programs foster peer relationship development, newly hired CNAs are able to integrate into a new environment with a support system that allows them to focus on care needs of assigned residents. Several different mentor programs are presented along with how these programs work impact the new hire experience.