Support your nurses! Today more than ever nurses are feeling undervalued, overworked, and underpaid causing an unsustainable rate of burnout and turnover. Nurses are quitting faster than Organizations, Hospitals and Facilities can hire their replacements. These are the nurses caring for our loved ones and ensuring everyone gets the care they need. . . and they are leaving nursing. Executive Nursing Management does not understand or relate to the issues nurses and patients are facing every day and continue asking more of the nurses without giving them the support they need or a cognizance of the outcomes. If they spent time on the units in the Organizations, Hospitals and Facilities, seeing first-hand the issues of the nursing staff they are supervising, it would open their eyes to what our awesome nurses do every day for our loved ones and facilitate the support our nurses need.

Nursing management is “responsible for setting operational goals, establishing action plans, allocating resources, organizing and staffing and solving problems and monitoring outcomes” (Sellgren,2008). To be able to fully perform these responsibilities, managers must be cognizant of the latest trends occurring on the floor and be able to conceptualize the present climate, issues, and barriers the Nurses are facing, on and in their workplaces. Studies have shown that Nursing Management has difficulty conceptualizing the problems in their ward they manage and lacked the emotional intelligence to lead change in wards due in part to an inability to empathize with the nursing staff. (Yoshimi Kodama, 2017) Nursing leadership must have both a micro and a macro perspective to be able to grasp the situation from the unit level up, to fully appreciate the scope of the unit’s problems, develop strategies and evaluate outcomes for change. (Yoshimi Kodama, 2017) The inability of executive nurse management to lead from the front and relate to nursing staff is the driver behind nurse dissatisfaction and the nations abysmal nursing staff retention states.  

It is this nurse’s opinion, that all executive nurse management from the top level to lower level, should be able to lead from the front and be able to care for patients on the floors under their management to comprehend the real time needs of the units, staff and patients. This nurse recommends that all Nurses, in all levels of the nurse management hierarchy be required to care for a team of patients, consistent with an average workload and acuity for a staff nurse on that floor, on the units they manage. Therefore, it is being proposed that Nursing Management should directly care for patients for no less than 24 hours per fiscal quarter (8 hours per month) to maintain their competencies. This requirement would allow executive nurse management to lead and relate to staff in facilities they manage.

References

Yoshimi Kodama, H. F. (2017). Nurse managers’ attributes to promote change in their wards: a qualitative study. Nursing Open, doi: 10.1002/nop2.87.

SELLGREN, S. T. I. N. A. F. R. A. N. S. S. O. N., EKVALL, G. O. R. A. N., & TOMSON, G. O. R. A. N. (2008). Leadership behaviour of nurse managers in relation to job satisfaction and work climate. Journal of Nursing Management, 16, 5, 578-587.