A nurse is an important person in the delivery of healthcare. However, it is natural for a newly trained nurse to face challenges in a newly appointed organization. Often nurse managers are harsh and fail to understand that newly trained nurses require support and guidance in their new roles. Just like the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2012) explains, the nurse manager is obliged with the mandate of ensuring that the nursing staff under his or her watch strive to achieve professional excellence in alignment with an organization’s mission and vision.
Also, as ambassadors of patient safety, they should ensure that the nurses are well equipped to achieve an organization’s performance standards. Thereby, this paper aims to highlight the essence of a nurse manager as a nurse coach aiming to elevate the performance of the nursing staff under her watch.
The major role of every nurse is to provide quality care to every patient under his or her care. Just like other registered nurses, as stated by the American Nurses Association (2016), a new registered nurse that recently joined the facility, I hold a position as a nurse manager was meant to undertake these roles professionally. Her roles included but were not limited to:
- Performing physical exams and obtaining the patients’ health histories.
- Health promotion alongside counseling and educating patients.
- Providing therapeutic care, including administering medications and providing wound care.
- Making critical decisions regarding the interpretation of patients’ information.
- Coordinating care through referrals to other healthcare professionals.
- Engaged in research to foster evidence-based care meant to improve the practice as well as the patient outcomes.
When I carried out a mere evaluation of the nurses’ performance to determine how they were progressing, I realized that the new nurse was struggling a lot to keep up with the demands of the facility. In the case of administering, there were many reported cases of medical errors to the extent that this duty was temporarily removed from her list of responsibilities. In addition, wound care was problematic because the wound healing took a longer time than usual for patients under her care.
In addition, she was struggling to make critical decisions, and often a fellow nurse had to intervene. I was very worried as a nurse manager and decided to have a face-to-face conversation with her. Apparently, she was exceptionally good at taking the histories and physically examining the patients. Also, most patients loved her for good counsel, informative education sessions, and the facility was pleased with her health promotion strategies, including talking to clients as she physically examined them prior to referring them to doctors.
However, when a patient needed specialized care, for example, psychological support, she failed to refer the client to the most relevant healthcare professional. Hence, during my talk with her, I realized that she had not undergone a thorough orientation process. In addition, she had just graduated from school, and she had not perfected her practical skills.
In comparison to her current performance, she was expected to attain a medical error rate of <5%, achieved a high wound healing rate of >80%. In addition, she was meant to make appropriate decisions regarding a patient’s condition upon physical examination to avoid delays. Hence, the delay time on her watch was 60 minutes away from the acceptable 30 minutes by the facility. Despite the fact that there are concerns for misses by healthcare professionals, such as medical errors until now, as indicated by Makary and Daniel (2016), there are no cut-off rates to guide the healthcare fraternity; hence, the health care facility has devised its own measurable indicators to assess performance in accordance with Dessler (2015).
As the nurse manager, it is part of my obligation to ensure that all the nurses under my watch are well-trained and possess the right hands-on skills to enable them to perform their job. Therefore, I intend to develop a training plan to ensure the nurses are well-trained. In addition, I will review their progress on a weekly basis based on their self-ratings to promote prompt response to issues as the nurses await the main performance appraisal process (Dessler, 2015).
As an organization that seeks to develop a culture of quality care, excellence, and safety as well as ensure that the employees regard the facility as the best place to work in, it is pivotal for me to ensure that the nurses are equipped with the relevant skills commensurate with their job responsibilities. Therefore, I intend to prepare a training session for recently enrolled nurses so that they are able to handle all the responsibilities assigned to them. In addition, he will help them move up the career path at the facility. Therefore, in order to achieve, I will be guided by the training plan described below to ensure that the nurse is able to perform as expected as she graduates to a supervisory role of other healthcare of a lower rank, such as the nurse aides.
Training Plan for Newly Recruited Registered Nurses
Three days will be set aside for newly recruited nurses to be trained, and this would take place in the facility’s board room.
Training Objectives
- To offer a detailed orientation of the entire facility and the various departments that new nurses should liaise with
- To discuss the facility’s goals, mission, and vision and a nurse’s role in achieving these organizational dimensions.
- To discuss the scope and standards of practice of a registered nurse.
- To delineate the facility’s performance standards of each nurse’s role.
- To describe the supervisory role of a registered nurse in the facility.
Introduction
Welcome Note
Warm-up activity: the nurses will be asked to list down their expectations while working in the facility and comment on whether the facility had met these expectations
(Nurses were not required to write down their names because this information was imperative for the organization’s evaluation and documentation)
Activities
- Day 1: Orientation, lecture, group activity 1
- Day 2: Recap, group-activity
- Day 3: Review of case studies
Conclusion: Summary of key concepts and points
In conclusion, training, which is part of a nurse manager’s duties, is one way through with the nurse manager can help a newly registered staff improve performance and achieve the set performance standards. Therefore, nurse managers should be supportive and not reprimand their subordinates in case they realize that their subordinates are struggling to achieve their goals in relation to an organization’s performance standards.
References
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2012). CUSP toolkit, the role of the nurse manager, facilitator notes. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
American Nurses Association. (2016). What nurses do. Web.
Dessler, G. (2015). Human Resource Management (14th ed.). New York: Prentice Hall, Inc.
Makary, M. A., & Daniel, M. (2016). Medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US. BMJ, 353. Web.