Nurse Manager Paper

Nurse Manager Paper NUR 4301 Nursing Seminar The nurse manager I selected to interview is a Baccalaureate degree nurse and has attended several in-house training sessions related to her position within the hospital. She attended Lenoir Rhyne University to obtain her BSN and has been employed with the institution for 13 years and has been in nursing for nearly 20 years. She is currently certified as a Certified Emergency Nurse (CEN) and is also a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner.
The Hospital that she is employed with is a private hospital she manages a 15 bed emergency department and 6 bed express care facility, which also holds several involuntary commitments for several hours at a time waiting on placement. This nurse manager oversees 62 persons within the emergency department of this private medical center. She works full-time, generally from 9:00am until 5:30pm, Monday-Friday.
The nurse manager must work closely with the emergency department Administrative Director to reinforce and disseminate information important to the nursing staff, she must enforce policies and carry out plans, and she must handle disciplinary problems that may arise in the absence of the Administrative Director. She is responsible for insuring that the ER flows smoothly with the assistance of the charge nurse. She ensures that supplies and equipment are available, she is involved in the interview process for new hires and must perform evaluations on current employees after probation and then annually.

The nurse manager I interviewed considers herself to be a democratic leader and delegates a huge portion of the day-to-day operations to the charge nurse, however she is not above performing actual clinical duties, especially in times of disaster or overcrowding. She considers her unit to flow smoothly and feels that teamwork is a key component to that success. This nurse manager considers herself to be a very effective leader, who encourages communication. She wants her employees to voice their concerns and ideas without fear of retaliation and the hospital is very supportive of that mindset.
She has an open door policy and considers her employees to be like family. She expects her employees to maintain a positive attitude and if they do not have one she helps them to achieve a positive attitude. The major challenges that she expressed to me were understaffing and constant bickering between certain female co-workers. With regard to understaffing, corporate has not offered any viable solutions, due to non-peak times in the ER. This means at times it is either feast or famine. The staff knows this and tends to simply suck it up and pull together when it gets busy.
When co-workers come to her with a complaint she takes time to discuss the matter in depth and non-judgmentally with the employee, surprisingly in most cases she stated that after the discussion it turned out that the problem originated with the one filing the complaint. She further works with the person on strategies to be a more effective interpersonal communicator and soon the problems lessen or resolve entirely. The nurse manager stated that her vision for her unit was to have her entire staff be clinically sound and function confidently under adverse client load.
She expects upmost teamwork from her staff and expects the unit to operate efficiently with upmost regard for staff and client safety. She went on to add that she was initially unsure about being a nurse manager, she was encouraged to apply by her the Administrative Director and once promoted, she was given little direction in how to perform her job. She met with the charge nurses and basically took their group input on how the unit would operate effectively and fine-tuned it, the result has been very effective and had excellent feedback from her employees as well as upper management.
She did add that managing people is far more tiring and difficult than managing patient care. She also expressed to me that she did miss working on the floor and dealing directly with the clients regularly. I felt that based on her feedback the nurse manager that I interviewed was a very effective unit manager; she applied fundamental concepts to the management of her staff which primarily focused on effective communication and teamwork. These concepts also support her own theory that she is a democratic leader. References Huber, Diane. (2010). Leadership and nursing care management. Maryland Heights, MO: Saunders Elsevier.