We are looking at technician training and retention, like I am sure many are. This boarders between operations and safety. IN particular we want to: 1) visually signal to our technicians that we are investing in them and their career path and 2) ensuring the quality components (such as training/educating the "why" to avoid short-cuts and work-arounds, helping ensuring adequate training and ongoing education, ensuring training matches practice, and there is a certain level personal commitment.

Questions:

• What is everyone doing with this?
• Is this solely on the operations manager and direct-reports?
• If you have system responsibilities for your trainer/educator, does the trainer/educator report to a vertical (operations) or horizontal manager (clinical or med safety)?
• If you do have trainers specifically within the Pharmacy department, what else do you have them do?

What holes can you poke in our proposed approach?
A 2-person team to handle onboarding and have regular check-ins with the new-hires. This is intended to be in parallel with the technician supervisors. They have the first week with the new hire (centrally), then regularly scheduled check-ins to confirm technique and answer questions (at the hiring site). They also have a regularly scheduled re-orientation with veteran staff to ensure that we are doing things in a similar fashion (perhaps not the "how," but at least the "what").

We want them to ease into quality assurance checks, such as easily verifiable tasks that the technicians perform. This is in anticipation that some periods of time will not be as heavy on the retention side than others. If you have a med safety technician, I would love to hear from you as well.

Thank you,
Joel