Setting SMART Goals in Nursing: Examples and Strategies (2024)

Host Healthcareprovided this article.

Having ambitions as a travel nurse is important. It’s what makes your role that much more meaningful. But having a realistic and actionable plan in place is what will help you bring your goals to fruition and make the greatest impact.

Well-planned, intelligently conceived, and designed to help you grow without being unrealistic, SMART goals are essential to helping you plan and navigate your career in nursing.

So how exactly do you plan and write them, and what are the SMART goals nursing professionals find most useful when working as travel nurses?

The ABCs of Goal Setting

Perhaps you already have long-term goals and a detailed plan for your career path. But if you’re like most of us, planning ahead can be vague, changeable, or inconsistent.

Whether you’re starting from a blank slate or checking in on a plan in progress, it’s useful to take some time annually to review goals, celebrate successes, and consider the following:

• What do I want to be doing in one year? In five years? In ten years?
• Do I want to practice, manage, or teach in my field?
• Who can I connect with in a mentor or coaching role for me?
• What continuing education, certification, or training is critical to my specific goal?

Have you visualized your career but aren’t completely clear on achieving your travel nursing goals? Effective nursing goal setting is based on understanding your values, applying them to big dreams, and breaking those dreams into small achievable steps so you can actively include them in your day.

What Are SMART Goals?

SMART goal setting is a practice used in many professional environments, and travel nurses can use it to set both career goals and personal goals. The acronym breaks down to:

• Specific – Identify the exact goal
• Measurable – Set objectives that can be measured and allow you to track the success
• Attainable – Be realistic about necessary skills and available resources
• Relevant – Ensure the specific goal is connected to critical skill-building or desired outcomes
• Time-Bound – Set a deadline for when you plan to achieve your goal

For instance, if you want to have strong relationships with your colleagues during a job assignment and learn from them, you could build that into a SMART goal such as:

Increase collaborative skills by having lunch with team member(s) once per week, identifying two colleagues to ask for best practices training/sharing, and requesting three peer evaluations at the end of this assignment.

This goal is specific (increase collaborative skills) in clarifying not just an end goal but the plan to reach it. It includes steps that can be measured (one weekly lunch, two colleague training, and three peer reviews). The steps are attainable and realistic, and they’re relevant to both connection and collaboration as well as overall nursing career development. Finally, timeliness is based on completing all steps by the end of the job assignment (plus the weekly lunch scheduling).

Setting Goals

Regardless of specialty, some important nursing goals are popular across the board. You may want to focus on improving the following:

• Patient communication skills
• Staff and patient safety practices
• Patient care procedures, including start and end of shift transitions
• Documentation accuracy and timeliness
• Professional development based on continuing education and training

But again, these bullet points aren’t actual SMART goals for nursing. For those, you’ll need to clarify what you want to achieve, how you’ll do it, when it’ll be done, how it can be measured, and understand how it relates to your role.

For example, let’s consider the first bullet point. Converting “patient communication skills” to a nursing SMART goal could look like this:

Step 1: I will sit down with each new patient, introduce myself, and ask what they want to be called.

Step 2: After completing the intake form with them, I’ll give them my full attention and ask what questions they have, making a note of this exchange in the notes section.

Step 3: To help keep this in mind, I’ll set up a weekly calendar prompt with reminders about my goals and ask management to forward survey responses from my patients.

SMART Goals for Travel Nurses

For travel nurses specifically, the process of onboarding in a new role requires its own skills and goal setting. Between learning the systems and practices of a new environment, meeting new management, and developing connections with fellow nurses, there are additional aspects of the assignment to consider. When creating your SMART goals in travel nursing, you may want to emphasize the following:

• Nursing informatics (data and technology) across multiple popular systems
• Speech and interpersonal communication skills
• Negotiation and assertiveness skills
• New reports and studies in evidence-based practical nursing

Partner with Host Healthcare to Meet Your Travel Nursing Goals

One of the smartest ways to meet your professional goals as a travel nurse is to work with the Host Healthcare team. From the very start, we’ll help you with your travel nurse application and connect with you to understand your personal and professional plans. We will continue to act as a resource and support system throughout your placement.

Working as a travel nurse multiplies your opportunities to learn new skills, master new professional environments, and try new roles. Through travel nursing, you will have more opportunities to find positions that match your current skills and allow you to develop new ones.

Ready to learn more? Connect with a specialist at Host Healthcare today to discuss your travel nurse goals and receive a hand-picked list of opportunities for you.

Ourjob board is a great place to search for your next travel nurse assignment.We have you covered with our housing page if housing is an issue. You cansearch for what you are looking for.

Sources:

Nursing CE Central. The Use of SMART Goals in Nursing. https://nursingcecentral.com/the-use-of-smart-goals-in-nursing/

If you are a new travel nurse or looking into becoming a travel nurse:

Travel Nurse Guide: Step-by-Step (now offered in a PDF Downloadable version!)