Helping Charge Nurses understand their leadership role
As the amount of patients admitted to hospitals every day increases, it becomes more pressing to ensure front-line leaders—charge nurses—are well aware of their role, responsibility, accountability, and authority.
It is the role of the charge nurse that is the key to providing leadership at the point of care, retention and turnover of staff, ensuring safe and effective practice occurs, and enhancing the patient/family experience by ensuring excellent quality care.
Most charge nurses, when asked about their role, responsibility, accountability, and authority (RAA) within their particular organization, felt confident about three of the four areas.
The charge nurses could state some aspects of what their role and responsibilities are, as well as their accountability. However, they were hesitant to answer what they felt their authority as a charge nurse is.
Want to learn more on how to help charge nurses understand their role and responsibility in the organization? For the full article, visit the Reading Room on the Web site Strategies for Nurse Managers by clicking here.
About the Author: Sarah is an Editorial Assistant in the patient safety group at HCPro, Inc. She contributes to two monthly newsletters; Briefings on the Joint Commission and Briefings on Patient Safety, and manages four e-zines; Accreditation Connection, AHAP Staff Challenge, Nurse Manager Weekly, and Healthcare Training Weekly. She also helps research new products for the patient safety and nursing market. She graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2008 where she earned her bachelor's degree in English.
Janet Agu | Mar 25, 2010 | Reply
An essential part of leadership is to encourage or influence people that you are managing or people under you. Sometimes leaders are the worst influence elements around their employer.
Sometimes leaders seem to be paranoid, which manifested with their behaviors. Some leaders are good with rewarding their employers, and sometimes they will reward them with gifts that have no meaning. When the followers observe the attitude or the behaviors, motivation of the employing drops. This will lead to an unhappy environment, incomplete works, misunderstanding, and mistrust. All of this can bring a rude environment.
Another type of leadership is coercive power. Coercive power is where the leaders start exercising their power, by controlling over their followers. This happens when the leaders feel that their followers are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. The leaders get in control by showing attitudes through punishment, like laying them off the job, threatening staff, and deny staff of promotions. I personal believe that this should be done reasonably to provide safety to the environment. Leadership is supposed to be encouraging, understanding, interesting, and emerging, in order to promote health. This will bring room to get more followers.
Leadership can be exciting if the leader can reward the followers. This can be done by making the followers understand that they can be punished without being abused.