I'm Frank Sturniolo — 25 years as an emergency nurse, 7 more spent building the education, onboarding, and mentorship programs that new grads go through on their first day. I help nurses build the judgment and composure that no orientation checklist can hand them.
ScrollI've spent 25 years working emergency departments — the overnight surges, the codes, the quiet 4am shifts where you learn the most. The last 7 have been in nursing education, operations, HR, and mentoring: building new-grad bootcamps, running simulation days, and having the conversations orientation doesn't leave room for.
Outside the department, I read Jungian psychology, leadership, and personality theory — not as an academic exercise, but because it's given me a better vocabulary for what actually happens to a new nurse under pressure, and how to talk someone through it.
Every ED nurse knows SBAR — it's how we hand off what matters in under a minute. Here's mine.
The transition from nursing school to clinical practice is one of the most challenging professional transitions in healthcare. New nurses often enter the workforce with adequate theoretical knowledge, yet experience uncertainty, hesitation, and overwhelm when faced with real-world responsibility. This gap is not primarily a knowledge problem — it is a readiness problem.
The Clinical Readiness System™ was created to address this gap.
The Clinical Readiness System™ is a structured, stage-based framework that helps nurses develop readiness for clinical practice through progressive layers of responsibility, thinking, and action. Rather than focusing on memorization or task completion, the system emphasizes role clarity, clinical thinking, and safe execution under uncertainty.
Many nurses struggle early in practice not because they lack knowledge, but because expectations, priorities, and decision thresholds are unclear. This leads to anxiety, hesitation, delayed escalation, and burnout. The Clinical Readiness System™ makes readiness explicit, structured, and measurable.
Expect a gap between what nursing school taught you and what the floor actually demands. Most new ED nurses have adequate clinical knowledge but struggle with the unclear expectations, priorities, and decision thresholds that only come with real shifts — leading to hesitation, delayed escalation, and early burnout. The fastest way through it is naming those specific gaps early and working on them deliberately, rather than hoping confidence arrives on its own.
Look for someone with direct, extended experience in your specialty who has also spent time formally teaching or mentoring — not just an experienced nurse, but one who has taught new grads before. Many hospitals offer informal preceptors, but a dedicated outside mentor can offer perspective without the pressure of a workplace evaluation.
A structured, stage-based framework that helps nurses build readiness for clinical practice through progressive layers of responsibility, thinking, and action. Instead of focusing on memorization or task completion, it makes readiness explicit and measurable by identifying exactly where a nurse's role clarity, clinical thinking, or execution under uncertainty needs work.
The initial 1:1 fit call is free — a 60-minute Zoom conversation to see if working together makes sense, with no obligation. Paid options include single 1-hour coaching sessions and a longer 3-month coaching program for nurses who want sustained support.
Usually not. Most new ED nurses have adequate theoretical knowledge from nursing school. What they lack is readiness — clarity on expectations, priorities, and when to escalate — which is a different problem from a knowledge gap and requires a different kind of support to solve.
Burnout in emergency nursing is rarely caused by workload alone. It's often driven by prolonged hesitation and unresolved uncertainty — not knowing where you stand, second-guessing decisions, and never fully closing the loop on whether you're doing things right. Preventing it means addressing that uncertainty early and directly, rather than waiting until exhaustion or anxiety has already taken hold.
SBAR stands for Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation. It's a structured handoff framework nurses use to communicate a patient's status clearly and quickly, especially under time pressure. New nurses often know the acronym from school but struggle to apply it fluidly in real handoffs — that fluency comes from practice and coaching, not memorization alone.
Start wherever makes sense for you — there's no wrong door in.
A relaxed 60-minute Zoom conversation — no agenda beyond getting to know each other and seeing if we'd work well together. No pressure, no obligation.
Book a fit callA focused hour on whatever's in front of you right now — a hard shift, a decision, a confidence gap. Good for a single sticking point or an occasional check-in.
Ask about a sessionRegular sessions over three months for nurses who want sustained support through a transition — new grad year, a new unit, or stepping into more responsibility.
Ask about the program