The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Instructions

1. Answer question 1

Scenarios/Questions (choose one)
1. In acute care, a charge nurse is assigned to oversee a unit, and a nursing supervisor oversees the nursing role across a facility. All work together to control the flow of patients in and out of the unit and facility, make staffing assignments, and assist with problems and crises. Consider this situation: A nurse is dealing with a crisis for one patient and misses a second patient crisis—a young woman who died from a postoperative hemorrhage. In this tragic situation, competing crisis events on the unit prevented a nurse from adequately monitoring other assigned patients on the unit. The charge nurse and nursing supervisor stated in the Board of Nursing’s investigation of the event that they depended on the individual nurse to alert them if help was needed.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

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Question: Describe a systems-based solution that could have prevented this event. (DO NOT state what the nurse should have done differently; you are to describe a systems-based solution, not a personal, professional one.)

PERCEPTIONS OF THE ROLE OF NURSES.A recent study by Field and Pearson (2010) in the International Journal of Nursing Practice discussed the portrayal of nurses who murder their patients. The discussion centred on why these murders create such shock and horror in the general public. To quote from the paper ‘… The thought that nurses can coldly premedi-tate, calculate and execute the murder of patients is more shocking and more disturbing for fami-lies, investigators, prosecutors and the public at large’ (Field & Pearson, 2010, p. 305). Such sen-timents are redolent of the reasons that most of the nurses who killed their patients in the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programs were never punished – it was thought that nurses would never do those things (Benedict, O’Donnell, & Shields, 2009).It makes one wonder what it is about the role of nurses that makes them seem to be, as Darbyshire (2010) suggests, either ‘heroines, hookers or harridans’. Darbyshire discusses the stereotypes surrounding nursing, of ‘angels’, ‘doctors’ handmaidens’, ‘battleaxes’, ‘naughty nurses’ and ‘nymphomaniacs’, and he posits that such stereotypes have a long history, with their genesis in Victorian times, and continued use in current media shows like ER, House, etcetera. A personal essay on the role of the nurseLINDA SHIELDSTropical Health Research Unit, James Cook University and Townsville Health District, Townsville, QLD, Australia; The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay School of Medicine, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, AustraliaAbstract: Nursing has suffered a lack of understanding by the general public, who often can see no further than stereotypes of heroine, harlot, harridan or handmaiden. These have colored nursing’s development as a profession, in Australia as in the rest of the world. Australia, as the ‘lucky country’ has one of the best health systems in the world, and Australian nurses are amongst those at the forefront of the profession. However, it appears that Australian nurses, as with many sections of Australian society, do not recognize that they hold high professional standards. With the inﬂ uence of the international nursing shortage and the ever-growing technological advances within health care, alternatives to nurses, and to the registered nurse, are emerging. It is vitally important that nursing controls and regulates these developments. Only by protecting the legitimate role of the nurse, ensuring that education standards are maintained at the highest appropriate level, and generating and using new nursing knowledge will outcomes for all those who come to us for care be of the highest order. The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay This essay proposes that Australian nurses need to overcome the ‘cultural cringe’ and recognize that they are in charge of a profession which meets the highest international standards.Keywords: leadership, professional development, workforce issuesThe written history of nursing is replete with descriptions of the development and causes of these stereotypes.The role of nurses as we know them today, [as opposed to the medieval male-dominated world of monasteries and monks] was ﬁ rst recognized in the 16th Century, at least in the English-speaking world. Boulton (2007) reports a widow, Ellen Wright, of St. Botolph Aldgate (London) who, from 1588–1599 took sick people and pregnant women into her house and cared for them. He describes parish nurses working in London in the early 1700s, who, for a living, took in sick pau-pers, and nursed them. These women sometimes had over 20 people in their care, and usually there was one nurse for every 10–15 patients in their establishments. Today, we are so inﬂ uenced by the ubiquity of Florence Nightingale that we for-get that nursing has been around for much lon-ger than the 19th Century. Indeed, I would lay some blame for the misconceptions surrounding the role of the nurses today at the feet of Florence Nightingale, or at least the large public relations machine which operated around her, often to the detriment of her real achievements in the ﬁ elds of epidemiology and statistics. Vera Brittain, a young woman who went to World War I as a voluntary
Linda Shields214C NC NC NC NVolume 43, Issue 2, February 2013 © eContent Management Pty Ltdladies died, all on their own, and from probably preventable causes, because there were only two teenagers to care for all of them. And these are now called the ‘good old days’! The role of the nurse then was to complete as many of the tasks as possible before end of shift (punishment such as a severe dressing down ensued if one did not complete the task list) and it was forbidden to sit and talk with the patients.NURSING AND THE ‘CULTURAL CRINGE’Australia is known as the ‘lucky country’. Horne (2008), in coining that phrase in the 1960s, used it as an irony, to warn that unless we as a nation moved away from the isolationist and colonial complacency that characterized much of Australian thinking, Australians would lose the qualities which made up their psyche, such as ‘a fair go’ and ‘mateship’. Illustrative of the fact that we may have saved ourselves from such a fate is the disgust (tainted, perhaps, by smugness) which Australians expressed when told about the dif-ﬁ culty with which Barack Obama was forced to tackle the provision of equitable health care provi-sion in the United States of America (USA) (Rae, 2010). The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay However, we should and could look at home to see that the risk of losing our strong sense of equity is transpiring, as demonstrated by the approach to asylum seekers taken by both major parties in the last election campaign (Dunkerley, 2010). When considering the role of the nurse, the ‘lucky country’ in its ironical sense is illus-trated in the way we look to other countries for leadership. We have the means, ability, talent, capacity and expertise to maintain our world leadership, but we are slow to recognize this. In a speech to the John Curtin Parliamentary Library at Curtin University on July 6, the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, The Honorable Steven Smith (2010), explained that Australia was interna-tionally recognized as being a ‘considerable and signiﬁ cant nation’, as demonstrated by its place at the table in the G20 meetings. Australia has the second-highest human development index, after Norway, in the world (United Nations Development Program, 2009). It has the fourth highest life expectancy (Australian Government, 2010), and amongst the lowest infant and maternal aid detachment (VAD) nurse, condemned all that Nightingale had come to stand for. To quote:… I thought then that the ‘holiness’ of the nursing profession is easily its worst handicap; a profession, it seems, has only to be called a ‘vocation’ for irrespon-sible authority to be left free to indulge in a type of exploitation which is not excused by its habitual cam-ouﬂ age as a ‘discipline’. What is true – it has to be true – that most of the women who choose this harsh, exacting life are urged by semi-conscious idealism, but idealists, being eager and sensitive, are often more liable to nervous strain than the less altruistic who take care of themselves before they think of others. (Brittain, 1933, p. 454)This was written in 1933, surely things have changed now?NURSING IN AUSTRALIAHistory aids in contemplation of modern per-plexities, and at present, there is much in the role of the nurse to perplex, even here in Australia. Australia has an advanced health care system. Its dichotomy of public and private services means that choice exists, with a concomitant ability to access the highest technology and expertise with ease and equity in both public and private sys-tems (and with a sound safety net for the disad-vantaged). Australian nursing, also, is advanced in practice, research and education. Australia is one of the few countries in the world where a degree is the basic qualiﬁ cation for registration, with postgraduate study required for specializa-tion. There are some detractors from this prin-ciple; however, the work of Dufﬁ eld et al. (2007) and Aiken, Clarke, Cheung, Sloane, and Silber (2003) ably and rigorously demonstrates that patient outcomes are optimized with a well-educated nursing workforce. The perplexity here is that some reprovers think that nursing has lost its way, and should return to hospital train-ing. Personally, I strongly oppose such notions, having lived through years of hospital training, when, in a large metropolitan hospital, night stafﬁ ng comprised two trainee nurses for 60 patients, and one registered nurse for two ﬂ oors. Indeed, I well remember a night duty shift when, on a ward built for 36 patients, but which, on this particular night, held over 60, eight old The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay
A personal essay on the role of the nurse215C NC NC NC N© eContent Management Pty Ltd Volume 43, Issue 2, February 2013titles, as they do, especially under the ‘modern matron’ initiative). Darbyshire’s (2010) analy-sis of the public’s perceptions of nurses’ roles as heroine, hooker or harridan sums up the miscon-ceptions that surround nursing today. But what is it about nursing that: (a) makes these fallacies so tenacious; and (b) makes nursing such a fertile ﬁ eld for widely held misconstructions of nurs-ing roles? The general public would never hold strong opinions about the education of, say, engi-neers, or lawyers. Why does everyone think they know what is best for nursing? No where is this better illustrated than in the furore in the British media when the Nursing and Midwifery Council announced that from 2013, a degree would be the minimum qualiﬁ cation for registration (BBC News, 2009) (at present, only about 10% of nurses have a degree (Sastry, 2005)). A commen-tator in the Daily Telegraph stated:Of course, medicine is a university course with a very large element of apprenticeship about it. But medicine is both a learned profession and a severely practical art, which nursing is not and is never likely to be … The quest for power and status, then, is more important than the quest for higher nursing standards. That is why the nurses’ leaders are so keen on the idea: kudos is their goal. (Dalrymple, 2009) While a journalist in The Sunday Times wrote ‘All sorts of people who might make excellent nurses will be put off, and lost to nursing: anyone who is not particularly academic; anyone who – frankly – is not particularly bright’ (Marrin, 2009). It is hard to imagine commentators having the effrontery to write similarly about other professions. Why do they feel they know enough about the role of the nurse to declare how they think the profession should be educated?NURSING WITHIN AUSTRALIA’S CULTUREOne of the reasons Australia is so successful is its ability to critically analyze itself, or perhaps, those who take themselves too seriously. This may be cultural, a part of the ‘fair go’ ethos that means we do not suffer fools gladly. One hears papers at international conferences which present innova-tions and initiatives in research, and in health ser-vices, which give a glowing report of the subject mortality rates (World Health Organization, 2006). In other words, from a health perspective, Australia is indeed, the lucky country. However, we Australians are very slow to recognize and acknowledge that we are a ‘considerable and sig-niﬁ cant nation’ and I believe this is as true for nursing as it is for the rest of Australia.Why do so many Australian conferences have keynote speakers from the USA or the United Kingdom (UK)? Importing ideas and expertise from outside the country is a good thing, but why do we not look to other countries, such as Thailand, where nursing has been taught in uni-versities for over 40 years, or the Nordic coun-tries, with their amazing health care systems? The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay What is it about the UK that takes us back there, especially given the current critique of con-cerns about British nursing (Shields & Watson, 2007, 2008; Watson & Shields, 2009; Watson & Thompson, 2004)? Could we be doing what Donald Horne warned about, and are we still stuck in a colonial rut, unable to break away from the ‘mother country’? When I see state govern-ments, such as those in Victoria and Tasmania, bring people from the National Health Service to tell them how to run health services, and in that, nursing, as they did in 2004–2005 (Victorian Government, Department of Human Services, 2005) and 2008 (Elcoat, 2008), I suggest that the Australian cultural cringe is alive and well, that we do not recognize our real capacity and standing in the world, and do not acknowledge (or perhaps appreciate) that Australian nursing is a world leader.ERRONEOUS IMAGES OF NURSINGI frequently wonder what it is about nursing that leads others to think they know what it is nurses do. Very often, public perceptions of nurses are ﬂ awed. Nightingale’s publicity machine started it off lady with the lamp, and nursing’s devel-opment was for so long linked with religious orders and promotion of nursing as vocational (Summers, 1989) that the resulting stereotypes are proving intractable. Even today, nurses in the UK commonly see themselves as ‘sister’ and ‘matron’ (Watson & Thompson, 2003) (one won-ders about the men who happily take on these
Linda Shields216C NC NC NC NVolume 43, Issue 2, February 2013 © eContent Management Pty LtdMany countries and possibly some places here in Australia are employing minimally educated health care workers (McKenna, Thompson, & Watson, 2008).

To protect the role of the nurse, we must be proactive here. Unless nursing as a profession controls the role of the health care assistant, then we will lose much of our role. The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay A third level nurse, an assistant in nursing, must be brought under the aegis of a registered nurse. After all, it is part of the role of the registered nurse to be legally responsible for those deliver-ing nursing care. We cannot afford to allow health care assistants, who undertake some nursing roles, to be under the control of any other profes-sion, especially when registered nurses are legally responsible for what they do.There is another facet of development in the health professions workforce that must give us cause for concern if we are to protect the role of the nurse. Technicians of all kinds are begin-ning to be seen in health services. These are being allowed to take on the role of nurses [and in some instances doctors, for example, endoscopists], and strangely, it is often nurses who are educat-ing them. The most obvious example of this is operating department practitioners, people who are educated to do circulating and scrub roles in operating theaters, but who do not and cannot undertake the role of the perioperative nurse. Their role is limited, and they do not have an education which includes critical thinking ability and problem solving, an inherent part of role of the perioperative nurse. Technicians have little of the knowledge of well educated, specialist peri-operative nurses, who provide complete care for patients throughout the total operating theatre process (Shields & Watson, 2007). Consequently, operating department practitioners are unable to give holistic perioperative care.NURSE PRACTITIONERSAt the moment in Australia we are seeing exciting initiatives in the development of the role of the nurse practitioner. While this is appealing, a word of caution should be sounded. These highly spe-cialized nurses have a very real role to play in a huge range of health care settings. Specialist areas such as wound care, diabetes, and critical care; primary to hand. Australians, on the other hand, are likely to present something ‘boots and all’. We use a criticality that allows us to see problems, address them, and then evaluate the changes. This degree of criticality and the concomitant ability not to worry about face is something that we should ﬁ ght to maintain as part of our culture. For our purposes, when discussing the role of the nurse, we should embrace that criticality, that ability to examine what it is we do and what we need. Because we are the lucky country, the role of the nurse has been able to expand and improve patient care, generate new knowledge through a rich research culture, and provide some of the highest standards of education of nurses in the world. It is vitally important that we ﬁ ght to retain these high standards. We cannot allow the role of the nurse to be jeopardized by dumbing down entry lev-els to our universities (which is happening is some states (Hiatt, 2010)); nor should we allow educa-tion of registered nurses to take place anywhere outside a university (Royal College of Nursing, Australia, 2007).NURSING LEVELS AND ROLES, AND UNREGULATED WORKERSThis brings me to the role of different levels of nurses. The international nursing shortage is putting immense pressure on health workforces everywhere. It would be disingenuous of me to demand that all nurses are educated to degree level. The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay The second-level nurse, the enrolled nurse, is a vital part of any health workforce. The role of the enrolled nurse is expanding and develop-ing. For these vitally important members of the nursing profession, we must maintain high stan-dards in education. In some countries around the world, nursing education is done in senior-level high school (Shields & Hartati, 2003). The recent events in Australia that have seen a nursing degree being offered in a technical and further education (TAFE) college, might logically lead to enrolled nurse education being sent downwards to senior high school. We cannot afford to dumb down the role of the enrolled nurse, nor their education.The international nursing shortage is bringing about other changes which need careful moni-toring if the role of the nurse is to be protected.

Professional nursing holds a unique place in the American health care system. As members of the largest health care profession, the nation’s 3.1 million nurses work in diverse settings and fields and are frontline providers of health care services. While most nurses work in acute-care settings such as hospitals, nurses’ expertise and skills extend well beyond hospital walls. Working independently and with other health care professionals, nurses promote the health of individuals, families, and communities. Millions of Americans turn to nurses for delivery of primary health care services, health care education. and health advice and counseling. Nurses are critical links in maintaining a cutting-edge health care system.Nursing continues to be an indispensable service to the American public.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

21st century nurses preparing to care for a patient in a modern acute care hospital.21st century nurses preparing to care for a patient in a modern acute care hospital.While many may think of a nurse as someone who takes care of hospitalized patients, nurses also fill a wide variety of positions in health care in many varied settings, working both collaboratively and independently with other health care professionals. For example, most Americans are familiar with home care nurses who provide a plethora of nursing and health care services to patients in their homes. School nurses have a long history of providing health services to school children from kindergarten through high school. Nurses play a major role in delivering care to those residing in long-term-care facilities such as nursing homes. Workers with job-related health concerns often seek out nurses employed by business and industry. Many people visit a nurse practitioner as their primary caregiver. Expectant mothers often prefer nurse midwives as their health care providers during pregnancy and childbirth. And each day, in operating rooms across the country, nurse anesthetists insure that patients undergoing surgery receive safe anesthesia care. Today, schools of nursing compete for the brightest applicants, and nursing is highly regarded as an excellent career choice for both women and men.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Florence Nightingale

Florence NightingaleFlorence NightingaleMost people think of the nursing profession as beginning with the work of Florence Nightingale, an upper class British woman who captured the public imagination when she led a group of female nurses to the Crimea in October of 1854 to deliver nursing service to British soldiers. Upon her return to England, Nightingale successfully established nurse education programs in a number of British hospitals. These schools were organized around a specific set of ideas about how nurses should be educated, developed by Nightingale often referred to as the “Nightingale Principles.” Actually, while Nightingale’s work was ground-breaking in that she confirmed that a corps of educated women, informed about health and the ways to promote it, could improve the care of patients based on a set of particular principles, she was the not the first to put these principles into action.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Nursing and Hospital Care in the United States
The Philadelphia Almshouse, 1835The Philadelphia Almshouse, 1835Throughout history most sick care took place in the home and was the responsibility of family, friends, and neighbors with knowledge of healing practices. In the United States, family-centered sickness care remained traditional until the nineteenth century. Sick care delivered by other than family and close acquaintances was generally limited to epidemics and plagues that periodically swept through towns and cities. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, urbanization and industrialization changed the way in which—and in many cases the place in which—sick individuals received care. Hospitals began to proliferate to serve those who were without the resources to provide their own care, and as hospitals increased in numbers so did the demand for caregivers who would be able to deliver thoughtful care to the patients in them. Early nineteenth-century hospitals were built mainly in more populated sections of the country, generally in large cities. Nursing care in these institutions differed enormously. In hospitals operated by religious nursing orders, patients received high quality care. But, in other institutions, nursing care was more variable, ranging from good in some hospitals, to haphazard and poor in others.

The Beginnings of Nurse Education
Click on the image to read a pdf of the full text.Click on the image to read a pdf of the full text.Recognizing the importance of good nursing care to a patient’s well-being, some physicians initiated courses for those interested in nursing. In 1798 Valentine Seaman, a New York physician, organized an early course of lectures for nurses who cared for maternity patients. An early nineteenth-century program, the Nurse Society of Philadelphia (also referred to as the Nurse Charity of Philadelphia) trained women in caring for mothers during childbirth and postpartum period. Its founder, Dr. Joseph Warrington, a strong advocate of providing instruction for women interested in pursuing nursing as an occupation, authored a 1839 book entitled The Nurse’s Guide Containing a Series of Instruction to Females who wish to Engage in the Important Business of Nursing Mother and Child in the Lying-In Chamber . This publication, which each Nurse Society nurse received, represents an early example of a nursing practice text. Between 1839 and 1850 the Nurse Society employed about fifty nurses, establishing an early practice of engaging nurses for care of patients in the home.

The outbreak of the Civil War created an immediate need for capable nurses to care for the enormous number of sick and wounded. About 20,000 women and men served as nurses in both the North and the South. The commendable service rendered by Civil War nurses provided a rationale for future experiments in setting up training programs for nursing. One such program was initiated in Pennsylvania where the Women’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered a six months nurse training course, which graduated its first class in 1869. Similar courses, such as that offered by the New England Hospital for Women and Children were begun in other locales.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Professional Nurse Education Begins
Philadelphia Hospital School of Nursing, first graduating class, 1886. Chief Nurse Alice Fisher i…Philadelphia Hospital School of Nursing, first graduating class, 1886. Chief Nurse Alice Fisher is fourth from the right, second row from the bottom.The year 1873 was a watershed year in American professional nursing history. In that year, three nurse educational programs—the New York Training School at Bellevue Hospital, the Connecticut Training School at the State Hospital (later renamed New Haven Hospital) and the Boston Training School at Massachusetts General Hospital—began operations. These three programs, all based on ideas advanced by Florence Nightingale, are generally acknowledged to be the forerunners of organized, professional nurse education in the United States.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

The success of these first three so-called “Nightingale schools” led to a proliferation of similar nursing schools, or as they were most commonly called, nurse training programs. By 1900, somewhere between 400 to 800 schools of nursing were in operation in the country. These programs followed a fairly typical pattern. The school was either affiliated with or owned by a hospital that provided the students with the clinical experience considered necessary for the education of a nurse. Students received two to three years of training. While in the program students carried out the majority of patient care activities offered in the hospital, receiving only a modicum of classroom education in the form of lectures on patient care and related subjects. At the end of the educational program, students received a diploma and were eligible to seek work as a trained nurse.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

When about 500,000 registered nurses retire in the coming decade, they won’t just leave a void in much-needed clinical care positions. Their departures will deplete the pool of nurse managers – the experienced professionals who bridge the gap between bedside care and administrative roles.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the need for some 1.1 million new registered nurses to meet the new demand and replace retirees, many in management positions. Nurses who plan to transition from management roles require skills that combine clinical expertise and leadership. Nurse managers are responsible for supervising nursing staff in a hospital or clinical setting. They oversee patient care, make management and budgetary decisions, set work schedules, coordinate meetings, and make decisions about personnel.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

“The nurse manager is responsible for creating safe, healthy environments that support the work of the health care team and contribute to patient engagement. The role is influential in creating a professional environment and fostering a culture where interdisciplinary team members are able to contribute to optimal patient outcomes and grow professionally,” the American Organization of Nurse Executives said.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Duquesne University’s online Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) degree program provides registered nurses with the skills to advance in their careers and an opportunity to play a role in furthering healthcare for future generations. The MSN program builds on baccalaureate-level practices to prepare graduates for advanced practice and management positions. Duquesne’s three areas of MSN specialization — Family (Individual Across the Lifespan) Nurse Practitioner, Forensic Nursing and Nursing Education and Faculty Role – allow registered nurses to choose their path.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Duties as a Nurse Manager and Leader
Nurses who serve in management positions are expected to not only make vital decisions to assist in patient care but are also expected to carry out defined duties that include the following:

Staff management
Case management
Treatment planning
Recruitment
Budgeting
Scheduling
Discharge planning
Mentoring
Developing educational plans
Records management
Nurse managers need strong communication and leadership skills. They should be adept at coordinating resources and personnel and meeting goals and objectives. They must be effective leaders who can strike a balance between working with the nursing staff and the healthcare facility administrators.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said nurse managers are change agents. They work with staff to find and implement useful changes to improve patient wellness and safety outcomes. Nurse managers also implement regulatory guidelines for patient safety set by state and federal agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Joint Commission, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. They have to make sure the staff is educated on care standards and can implement them as needed.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Nurse managers work in a number of clinical settings including hospitals, doctor’s offices, schools, and psychiatric institutions.

“Nurse managers lead their unit staff in preventing patient harm in their unit, empowering nurses to be the first line of defense against patient harm,” the agency reported.

Traits of a Successful Nurse Manager
Working as a nurse manager requires skills beyond clinical care. The job requires management skills, budgeting, and business acumen and leadership qualities. Communications and interpersonal skills are also vital. The following characteristics are common among successful nurse managers:
Effective Communication Skills – Part of being an effective leader is listening to staff and patient concerns and communicating needs. Nurse managers must be able to build a solid rapport with all staff members, from the janitorial staff to head administrators, as well as patients to create cohesiveness.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Advocacy – In some cases, nurse leaders might have to advocate for staff to ensure a safe and reasonable practice environment. In other cases, they might have to advocate for patient safety and access to quality healthcare. Nurse managers should not be afraid of using their voice and position.
Participation – With so many administrative demands, it is important that nurse managers balance business with patient care. Nurse managers must have superior clinical skills to ensure patient safety and wellbeing.
Mentoring – Successful nurse leaders do not micromanage their staff. They encourage, empower, mentor, and find strengths. They boost creativity and mindfulness.
Maturity – Nurse managers do not immediately take sides in squabbles or assess blame before knowing all the facts. They don’t let simmering emotions boil over. Instead, they meet conflict and work through it.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay
Professionalism – Nurse managers follow their moral compass to ensure all aspects of the profession are met with honesty and integrity. They address people with respect and do not bully.
Supportive – They don’t set the bar for expectations unreasonably high. Instead, they use supportive encouragement to challenge employees to success. They coach and mentor.
The Future of Nurse Managers
As the current nursing workforce ages and retires, the anticipated shortage of nurses will create opportunities for newly minted nurse managers. Researchers have found that nurse managers are vital to overall nurse retention because they influence the quality of work and the stability of a work environment.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

“Strong leadership qualities in the nursing unit manager have been associated with greater job satisfaction, reduced turnover intention among nursing staff, and improved patient outcomes. Nurse leaders need to be supported in an effort to retain nurses given ongoing workforce issues and to ensure high-quality patient care,” researchers said in the 2014 “Leadership skills for nursing unit managers to decrease intention to leave” study.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Researchers found there must be cohesive relationships among staff members and better communications with staff for nurse managers to do a better job in the future. Continual changes in healthcare and a focus on costs are among the many things that make the role of nurse manager challenges.

Nursing professionals at Florida Atlantic University encouraged leaders to “challenge their thinking and practices to recognize that the crux of leadership is in the power of relationships.”The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

“Growing future nurse leaders is a long-term quest that requires both planning and action,” authors of the “Growing Nurse Leaders: Their Perspectives on Nursing Leadership and Today’s Practice Environment” study found. “Our emerging leaders will ultimately replace our current leaders and continue the very important work being done to improve nursing practice environments, and most importantly, patient outcomes. Yet succession planning is challenging today in a healthcare environment that is fast-paced and constantly changing.”The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Students working toward an online MSN degree at Duquesne University are trained for the role of the nursing leaders. The program provides a broad-based nursing education that allows students to assume managerial roles and effectuate future changes in the profession. The online MSN program allows students to take nursing classes remotely and learn from leaders in the field while continuing their careers as registered nurses.

Nurse managers work in a number of clinical settings including hospitals, doctor’s offices, schools, and psychiatric institutions.

“Nurse managers lead their unit staff in preventing patient harm in their unit, empowering nurses to be the first line of defense against patient harm,” the agency reported.The Nursing Role Across a Health Facility Essay

Nursing professionals at Florida Atlantic University encouraged leaders to “challenge their thinking and practices to recognize that the crux of leadership is in the power of relationships.”