All Entries Tagged With: "nurse development"
Nurse liability: Keeping you and your staff educated and aware
As a nurse manager, you have many legal concerns. Not only must you be concerned with your own liability, but you must also stay alert about the liability risks of the nurses working under your supervision.
Although some liability risks are universal to all nursing practice areas, certain clinical settings also generate liability risks. As the nurse manager, being knowledgeable and educating your staff about universal liability risks and those specific to a practice area will increase the quality of care provided and reduce liability.
Some universal liability risks include the following:
- Failure to communicate patient’s condition to other healthcare professionals
- While a patient is hospitalized, his/her condition must be monitored continually and evaluated. Pertinent physical findings must be reported promptly to the healthcare professionals involved in the patient’s care. [more]
Managers’ role in promoting a professional image
We all try to shape up our physical appearance at one time or another. Or we may make an internal change in our personal attitude that eventually reflects on the outside with a positive change in body language or tone of voice.
Our actions—or lack of action—appearance, voice inflection, and ability to convey empathy and concern all play a role in our image. There are four categories we can focus on when considering as image makeover:
- Professional work environment and interactions
- Appearance
- Collegiality/team member role
- Professional accountabilities
Nurses in various areas of the profession—nursing departments, nursing individuals at all levels and practice, nurse faculty, and nursing students—can select a category and develop a program that reshapes their image at the individual or group level.
For instance, when making changes to professional work environment and interactions, remember:
- Do not carry on a discussion in the nurses’ station that you would not want others to hear
- Respect the equipment you work with and handle it as if you paid for it out of your own paycheck
- Support other nurses who are being approached unprofessionally
- Do not display any behaviors or gestures in view of coworkers, patients, or families that you would not want seen or heard
Managers can set expectations for professional appearance and should never forget to set a good example. Share with your staff these points:
- Dress for the respect you feel you deserve
- Follow your organizational dress code policies and procedures
- Recognize that your appearance affects perceptions of your competency
- Differentiate yourself in dress from the unlicensed members of your healthcare team
The stresses of the profession are minimized when nurses are able to care for patients in a collegial, supportive environment, where everyone is striving to provide the highest-quality patient care and deliver the best possible patient outcomes. Set expectations that your staff members will:
- Proactively offer to assist other members of the team to demonstrate team commitment
- Actively become involved in the orientation process of all new staff
- Not allow someone else’s unacceptable behavior to become their own behavior
- Be open to constructive criticism and feedback
Finally, managers should encourage their staff to hold themselves accountable to high standards as well. Remember to:
- Acknowledge that it is your name on the license, not your manager’s or your organization’s
- Maintain a current knowledge of your nurse practice act
- Belong to and support at least one professional nursing organization
- Document appropriately and according to nursing standards of practice
Source: The Image of Nursing: Perspectives on Shaping, Empowering, and Elevating the Nursing Profession.
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.
Time management tips for beating stress
Everything comes down to time management. You have to make sure there is enough time for your job, your significant other, your family, your friends, taking the kids to soccer practice and ballet lessons, the dog has to go to the vet, and somewhere in between all of that you are supposed to breathe and have time for yourself. In all this commotion, it can be hard to remain calm and stress free, especially for busy nurse managers struggling to keep track of other staff members and daily tasks. Exhausting!
Here are some helpful tips to remember while trying to manage your time and remain stress free:
Merging competency validation and performance evaluation
A new way to look at competencies, from the pages of our Briefings on Long-Term Care newsletter:
Making sure nurses are competent in their skill sets is one of the most important responsibilities of a director of nursing. But as the need for validation goes beyond technical skills and focuses on professional development as a whole, the traditional methods of assessing competencies need to be examined in a new light.
“It has always been important to validate competencies, but how some institutions are choosing to look at it is taking a different spin,” says Sheila St. Cyr, MS, RN-BC, OCN, performance-based development system coordinator at the University of Oklahoma (OU) Medical Center in Oklahoma City. “Now we’re not just looking at technical skills, we’re validating interpersonal skills as well. It used to be more about the technical skills checklist. And that’s just not how it should be.”
With the recent shift in focus, directors of nursing must arm themselves with the necessary tools and information to think beyond simply validating skill sets.
St. Cyr says there are two main areas of assessment on which to focus: competency validation and performance evaluation. Recently, the shift has been to combine the two efforts rather than have an instructor simply check off that a nurse is able to complete a particular skill.
Developing a definition of competency validation for your facility must take place prior to any assessments, says Diana Swihart, PhD, DMin, MSN, CS, APRNBC, clinical nurse specialist in nursing education at the Bay Pines (FL) VA Healthcare System.
When you begin working with staff members to validate competencies, St. Cyr says one of the best strategies toward education is to play the what-if game. “Use a questioning technique with staff members,” she says. Give your nurses a scenario, then ask the following questions:
- What complications can happen?
- What are the signs or symptoms?
- Would you need to call the doctor?
- What assessments would you need to make?
Other methods for validation, adds Swihart, can include:
- Case studies, which can help measure critical thinking
- Quality improvement monitors, which are a strong determinant of competency because they reflect an individual’s overall performance
- Mock events, which are useful in measuring cognitive knowledge
What methods are used at your organization?
Learning Management Systems: Their place in healthcare
By Diane M. Billings, EdD, RN, FAAN
Following our discussion during today’s audioconference, we realized that one big component of implementing new classroom technology includes bringing in a Learning Management System (LMS). Basically, an LMS includes software tools designed to manage learning. Many LMSs are Web-based and are able to facilitate “anytime, any place, any pace” access to administration and learning content. LMSs are especially relevant in healthcare as compliance training remains essential. Characteristics of LMSs often include:
- The ability to manage users, courses, and instructors
- The inclusion of a course calendar
- Access to messaging learners
- The chance to display scores and transcripts
There are many different types of LMSs that are available, including Blackboard Inc., Saba Software, and ATutor. What have your experiences been with using LMSs, and which ones have you found to be most effective (or ineffective) in your educational endeavors?
Connecting technology with nursing education
By Janet M. Phillips, PhDc, RN, Associate Instructor, Indiana University School of Nursing
In February, a colleague and I will be discussing the new technology that is available for nurse educators on an audioconference.
Many of you have likely already started bringing technology into your classrooms, and you might have encountered bumps along the way. What have been some of your difficulties in using technologies in education, and how have you resolved them?
