Transition to Practice: The North Carolina Initiative

Successful transition of newly licensed nurses into practice is essential for safe nursing practice. North Carolina has completed three phases of a transition-to-practice project. This article describes the results of Phase I, which studied the competence and confidence development of newly licensed registered nurses in acute-care hospitals. A key finding was a statistically significant relationship between the preceptor-new nurse relationship and the new nurses' self-reported competence scores.