New nursing career ladder strives to enrich professional development, improve job satisfaction, and more

WVU Medicine nurses are critical to improving patient outcomes with their care, but also in recruiting and retaining top nursing talent that helps the enterprise exponentially. The more competent, skillful, and qualified nurses an organization has, the more likely their ability to attract more.

WVU Medicine will soon launch the Clinical Advancement for Professional Excellence (CAPE) program for hospital-based direct care registered nurses to further boost the organization’s overall nursing efforts. CAPE is a new system-wide, clinical nursing program – or clinical ladder – designed to enrich professional development, promote quality of nursing at the bedside, improve job satisfaction, and provide a reward model for the highest quality clinical performance.

In 2018, the CAPE Task Force, composed of nurses from each system hospital and representatives from Human Resources, gained valuable information from a system-wide survey of all nurses.

This program will be the standard system of recognition for professional nurses. Additional communication with program details will be sent to eligible nurses.

Human Resources will look at market data to identify and develop similar career ladders for other clinical roles in the future.