All Entries in the "Healthcare communication" Category
Different ways peers are improving nurse satisfaction
The July 28 blog post discussing ways to boost nurse morale in a time of uncertainty has been one of the most popular recent topics. The post provided quick and helpful hints on no- or low-cost ways to boost the morale of nurses in your organizations. The post also generated a lot of discussion and many readers shared their own tips and strategies about what they have been trying.
Here are some of the highlights of the suggestions:
- Caught red handed campaign: Recognize staff members who have been “caught” doing their job well.
- Gift cards: Present a gift card to acknowledge a nurse who has gone out of his or her way to be an excellent nurse.
- Strive for five: Leave small questionnaires in plain sight of patients, visitors, and hospital staff members and ask everyone to fill them out. The person can comment on a particular staff member doing an excellent job, similar to a comment card at a restaurant. Any staff member receiving a good comment earns $10 on the next pay check.
- Hand written thank-you cards: Thank-you cards are always a great thing, but hand written ones can be the best. Instead of sending an email about a job well done to a staff member, write a thank-you card and leave it in their locker. After a tough shift, whether it’s night call or day call, the card will surely bring a smile to their face.
- The stupid nice game: Be over-the-top nice to everyone and overly complimentary to everyone at the hospital. Laughter is contagious, and sometimes taking the compliment to the next level, or having staff members realize how over the top you are being, could make their day that much better.
What are you doing at your organization to help boost staff members’ morale?
Taking the pulse of nurse-physician relationships
Taking the pulse of physician relationships is a good starting point for change. Doing so allows you to dissect the current relationships in your facility and make sense of the problems you face. Five categories can be broken down to define the types of relationships:
- Collegial: Relationships between the nurses and physicians have mutual respect and power. Because of this, both parties feel empowered. When both nurses and physicians have power, they are better able to recognize the value in each other’s education and experience. With this environment, physicians and nurses consult each other frequently and seek each other’s advice, to the full benefit of patients.
- Collaborative: Physicians and nurses participate together in the plan of care to produce positive outcomes for patients. The nurses and physicians have a mutual respect for each other. The key difference is that the power is not equal between nurses and physicians. The power difference does not interfere with the working relationship, and both parties are able to work together for the benefit of the patient.
- Teacher-student: The physician or the nurse takes on the role of mentor. Typically, the physician educates the nurse. Often, however, nurses are in a position to teach physicians what they have learned from their experiences.
- Neutral: These kinds of relationships evoke only indifference. Such relationships originally cropped up in healthcare when, in an effort to increase productivity, hospitals decided to move patient charts from the main nursing station to outside patients’ rooms. Now, physicians can come to the floor, write orders, put up the yellow flag on the chart rack, and never speak to anyone.
- Negative: Nurses report that negative patient outcomes occur more frequently when nurses interact with difficult physicians. After physicians establish a negative reputation for themselves, nurses will go out of their way to avoid them. The critical common thread in every disturbing physician-nurse interaction is that the patient loses.
How does your facility deal with difficult relationships between nurses and physicians?
Source: Speak Your Truth: Proven Strategies for Effective Nurse-Physician Communication
Correlating study tips with learning styles
It can be helpful for adult learners to identify their own learning style so they can determine study strategies that work best for them. The main types of learning styles are:
• Right brain
• Left brain
• Auditory
• Visual
• Tactile
What kind of learner are you? Visit www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com to download a free tool to assess your auditory, visual, and tactile learning preferences. You can also use this tool to assess others’ learning styles as well.
Nurses and their relationship with patients
As writers and editors for healthcare, there is a great deal of time spent writing about the realities of being a nurse today. But sometimes, our personal and professional lives cross paths and we get to experience the realities of nursing today from a firsthand perspective.
Recently, my personal and professional life intersected when I spent the day in and out of the hospital, interacting with nurses and physicians on different levels than I had expected.
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Create positive energy when speaking with your manager
We have all been in the situation where we are talking with a manager or supervisor about something and what we hear are all the reasons our idea won’t work.
We may hear:
“Oh, we tried that here a couple of years ago and that’s just not going to happen here.”
or
“Oh, yes, I think that’ a great idea, but that’s just not going to work here.”
or
“Do you remember so-and-so? He tried that here and he doesn’t work here anymore.”
When we walk away from the conversation, we feel defeated. We feel shot down. We need to think about how we can respond to the negative energy. [more]
