The AACN/University Health System Consortium (UHC) Residency Program was designed to expand the capacity of the university's baccalaureate nursing program and to develop a residency program to improve the competency of novice nurses. According to the study, the program's retention rate statistic of 89% was an improvement upon published reports indicating that the average nursing turnover rates of new graduates was 40-50% during the first year of employment ("AACN/UHC Nurse Residency Program," 2006, AACN website).
             To better test, the outcomes of the findings of the UHC graduate nursing program study to increase retention, satisfaction, and overall professional competence, graduates of the newly developed program should continue to be assessed with three evaluative instruments. However, these evaluations should be measured against the scores of graduates of a variety of less structured or more traditional nursing programs. Given the variety of nursing programs in existence across the country, ideally, a sampling of a wide variety of other programs should be selected, but with a similar group composition of age, gender, and previous academic preparation. Also, to assess the specific success of the developing UHC program, previous retention rates and former graduate's reports of self-efficacy before the program was instated should be used for comparison, as well as the national retention rate of nursing graduates. The retention rate from the selected control sampling should also be compared against the experimental group. The control group is actually likely to be a better contrasting measurement, given that the control sample will have a population similar in demographics to the experimental population of UHC nursing residents, and thus factors such as previous education level will have less of an influence upon the results.
             The first instrument used by the UHC study to assess its results was the McCloskey Mueller Satisfaction Scale...