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Work life balance for nurse managers: Get better work-home life balance

By Jeff on Aug 08, 2009 in Featured, Nursing Staff Management

In the first part of this series we addressed your mental / spiritual well being in regards to keeping your life as a nurse manager in balance. In this posting we will try to give you some resources to help you with the balance between work and home.

Maintaining the balance between work and home can take many forms:

You may be a workaholic who is addicted to the rush of work and taking care of patients, or feels that she can never do enough
You may be in a situation where you are working more than you want to (and have no choice really) and feel guilty about it
Or, you may be just a little unorganized and need to streamline some things to get your life back in order

Whatever the case is, the stress can be very real and as you know stress can lead to poor health. I recently heard someone describe this situation as “our priorities don’t match our responsibilities” and I would say that pretty much hits the nail on the head. Finding a way to line these two up may not make you less busy, but it does feel good knowing that what you are spending your time doing is what you should be doing.

In addition, your role as caregivers and/or managing caregivers will pretty much automatically guarantee you higher work stress than others; making a solid home life crucial. So here are some resources I found for you:

40 Mom-Tested Tips for Balancing Work and Family
Six Ways To Balance Work And Family Life
Balance Work and Family- Working Mother Magazine
The Juggle – WSJ
BlueSuitMom.com: Balancing Act

Overall the advice is fairly simple sounding, things like accepting help, delegating, guarding your private time, planning times to spend together, etc. but they are all probably a little harder to implement. But sometimes just having the ideas in your head can be enough to get you started and remember, they say it takes 21 days to turn a behavior into a habit. Do you have 3 weeks to create a better work / home balance?

Improve your nursing staff morale

By Jeff on Aug 01, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Staffing, Nursing Staff Management

As you know, a simple thank you can actually raise the morale among your nurses and help keep their energy and enthusiasm up through their shift.

Unfortunately, it is easy to forget such fundamental practices when your lives and schedule as nursing and staffing managers are so busy. But simple acts of kindness and and appreciation, like a thank you note after a rough day, can protect your nurses from contracting a “staff infection,” which often times can result in stress, conflict, low morale and turnover.

That’s why we put together a fun little handout with some simple tips to help you help your nursing staff. Check it out, you can download the 7 Steps to Better Nursing Morale ebook here.

How do you orient travel nurses?

By Jeff on Jul 17, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Staffing, Nursing Staff Management, Travel Nurses

One of the big concerns of nurse managers and hospital staffing managers is the length of time it takes to truly orient a new travel nurse into their hospital and unit. This is an understandable concern, if you consider you only have a temporary nurse for basically three months at your unit and if they are there, then most likely the hospital has an immediate need and getting them working as quickly as possible is crucial. The norm seems to be anywhere from a half-day to three days of orientation, whereas a permanent nurse may receive anywhere from a week to two weeks of orientation.

Because they are travel nurses coming to you through a travel nursing company you should be able to trust that the agency has qualified their skills and competency as a nurse, but there are still going to be still simple things like where are your supplies, where is the cafeteria, how is the floor organized, etc. that need ingrained quickly.

Obviously the orientation of a nurse is something that needs a delicate balance of speed and thoroughness, but there are not a lot of resources out there to help you build a quick, but effective orientation plan. At least that I could find. But, maybe we can help each other.

I would love to be able to provide some simple advice for our hospital clients (hopefully that is some of you) on how to make their orientation the most effective for them and for our travelers and I think you should be able to share with others hospital staffing and HR professionals the things that have worked for you. Handbooks? Quizzes? Mentors? Tour Guides? Puppet shows?

So if you have a second please share. If you want to be anonymous just send me an email at Jeff.Long@MedicalSolutions.com.

Work life balance for nurse managers: Reduce your stress

By Jeff on Jul 11, 2009 in Featured

If you look at your life as made up of three parts, with one leg representing your home/life, another representing your work life and another representing your mental well-being (physical, spiritual, holistic) it is easy to see how letting one area lag or another become too large can really throw you off balance and lead to nurse manager burnout.

Here is a collection of great links that are meant to help you address your mental well-being (don’t worry we will cover the other two legs of your life’s stool soon):

Stress Relief Tips for Busy Women
Stress Reduction Tips
Stress Reduction: Starting the Day
Tips For Stress

Are there any things you do that you think would be a help to other nurse managers?

Is your nursing staff burning out?

By Jeff on Jun 26, 2009 in Featured, Nursing Staff Management

We continue to see a lot of interest in the topic of nurse staff burnout coming to this blog. When even one of your staff is burned out it can cause such an emotional drain on you as a healthcare leader, your staff and your family.

We wanted to see what we can do to help the first thing we did was put together a quick poll to see how your hospital staff is doing? Let us know.

Build your best nursing unit

By Jeff on Jun 03, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Staffing, Nursing Staff Management

Right now having a full and consistent nursing staff has probably never been easier, thanks to the current economic drivers masking over the nursing shortage you are probably seeing the benefit being nurses that are more than willing to pick up an extra shift, great older nurses are hanging around a little longer and your internal float pool is overflowing. The challenge now is to manage that situation and take full advantage of the opportunities it gives you and your hospital to address some areas that normally cause nurse turnover and burnout. Some things you can do to fully utilize this time are:

Improve your nurse retention efforts
Develop future nursing leaders
Evaluate unit processes and build teamwork among nurses
Improve as a nursing leader
Put more recognition efforts in place
Improve the participation of the nurses in your units in the decision-making process
Find ways to establish professional growth opportunities
None of these initiatives have to cost a lot of money if they are done with some imagination. Here are some resources for each area:

Improve your nurse retention efforts
Use mentors to improve nurse retention
Improve Your Nurse Retention With The LifeWings Program
Improving Nurse Retention in Jordanian Public Hospitals: Discussion

Develop future nursing leaders
Attributes and Competencies Needed by Future Nurse Leaders and Managers*
Transformational Nursing Leadership
Developing Future Nursing Leaders for Today’s Nurse Leader: What are my responsibilities?

Evaluate unit processes and Build teamwork among nurses
Building Blocks of Teamwork
Effective strategies can reduce turnover rates, improve group cohesion and nurse satisfaction �
Quality work environments for nurse and patient safety
Building a Collaborative Nursing Practice to Promote Patient Education: An Inpatient and Outpatient Partnership

Improve yourself as a nursing leader
Nursing leadership
Leadership and nursing care management
What leadership styles should senior nurses develop?

Put more recognition efforts in place
Ways to Reward Employees (Without Spending a Dime)
10 No-Cost Ways to Recognize Employees
Five Tips for Effective Employee Recognition: How to Reward, Recognize, Award, and Thank People Successfully

Improve the participation of the nurses in your units in the decision-making process
Nurses Transform Unwieldy Decision-Making, Go Back to Bedside
Barriers to effective clinical decision making in nursing
Evidenced Based Nursing

Find ways to establish professional growth opportunities
National Nursing Staff Development Organization�
NurseLearn
Staff development nursing secrets

How does your hospital grade?

By Jeff on May 15, 2009 in Featured, Healthcare Hiring, Hospital Staffing

Have you ever wondered what the nurses and allied health professionals working for you thought of your unit, management style or hospital. Thanks to a new website called NurseRatings.org you may be able to find out. The site is very new and as of yet I have not seen any ratings take place, but I think that it is only a matter of time before traffic picks up for it (I have seen a fairly aggressive advertising campaign for it using Google). When it does, you will have two choices ignore what people say about your hospital or see it as a chance to make some real improvements.

Currently the site lets users rank anonymously on the following areas:

Doctor to Nurse Relationship

Nurse to Nurse Relationship

Pay

Location

Nurse Management

Professional Development

There are a couple of sites that are for patient ratings like, HealthGrades.com and Medicare.gov – Hospital Compare, but this site is a different approach to improving your patient care from the ground up. If all the areas are above are taken care of then there should inherently be good patient care going on at your hospital. I would be surprised if a hospital rated well on NurseRatings.org, but poorly on HealthGrades.com for instance.

Also, from a recruiting the best nursing staff standpoint, this site could be very beneficial or harmful. Seeing the feedback nurses are giving your hospital and making adjustments when appropriate is a great way to improve your overall nursing and allied health recruiting efforts.

Check the site out in a couple of months, I think you will see that there are plenty of ratings on it and some very useful information for all nursing and allied health unit managers, hospital staffing managers and hospital c-level decision makers to look at.

Help your young nurses hang in there

By Jeff on Apr 24, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Staffing, Nursing Staff Management

An article on Medical News Today discusses the recent healthcare summit at the White House that discussed the nursing shortage and the threat it poses on patient care in the United States. In the article they highlight a study by Dr. Peter Buerhaus that found that 80% of nurses believe the nursing shortage affects their ability to deliver quality care.

The University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC), an alliance of 103 academic medical centers and 210 of their affiliated hospitals, is asking hospitals to focus on nursing staff retention, especially during the economic downturn in support of Obama’s administration’s call to action.

The article discussed the UHC’s call for a greater emphasis on retaining new nurse graduates and highlighted their work with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) to create the UHC/AACN Nurse Residency Program. The one-year program provides a curriculum and support aimed at new graduate nurses by giving them the tools they need to survive the intense pressure that comes with being a nurse in a hospital. So far the program has had great results in improving nurse retention. One hospital system that has implemented the program saw its turnover rate for new nurses go from 34% to 7% after just two years.

I don’t know the numbers for other industries, but the number of young nurses leaving the profession seems very high. I have not run across the same thing for allied health specialties like physical therapists, occupational therapists or imaging techs. Is this because of a disconnect between what the student nurse is promised versus the reality, is the atmosphere too intimidating, are they not practicing in the specialty they wanted, are the older nurses hostile to the new nurses? From what I read these are all a big part of it, but with the nursing shortage so high it is important to address these issues as early as possible regradless of which one is the biggest contributor.

One way is implementing the UHC’s program at your hospital or creating your own similar program. Have you?

Another is to give your new nurses the tools they need. If your new nurses are dealing with this, RealityRN is a great website for them to check out. They can let off steam and talk to other nurses who have dealt with first year burn out in their nursing careers and get advice.

Are you ready for a change?

By Jeff on Jan 31, 2009 in Featured, Medical Solutions Staffing News

In this economy and considering the current state of the nursing and healthcare staffing industry, nurses and therapists don’t need “recruiters” who are not interested in the long term benefit they can bring to a travelers career. They need a partner who can understand their career goals and help them achieve them. At Medical Solutions we have always tried to build that kind of relationship with our nurses, therapists and techs so we finally decided to go ahead and officially change the titles of our Recruiters to Career Consultants.

What does this mean for you a nurse manager looking for travelers for your hospital? It means you can be more confident in your decision to use Medical Solutions knowing that your travel nurse or therapist is fully supported by a company that is looking for more than a quick commission. This kind of relationship with our travelers means that you can expect travelers that care about their nursing career and are not just in it for the money, but truly want to provide quality patient care and become better care givers.

Mentoring Programs designed to keep nurses, young and old.

By Jeff on Oct 07, 2008 in Nursing Shortage

Among the many attempts at easing the nursing shortage, there is one that is having a very positive affect. Hospitals all across the country are introducing a mentor program which is aimed at retaining the current or seasoned nurses while easing new hires into the workforce.

The mentor is paired with a new nurse or new hire and provides them with real world practice, advice and counseling. This is a great way to make new nurses feel welcome and at ease while building their confidence to handle the workload and at the same time giving some relief to the veterans and encouragement to stay longer. For both the overall goal is to give them enhanced job enrichment.

It is important that mentors understand that their role is to teach, coach, and share wisdom; to listen and advise; to help increase motivation and job satisfaction; and to provide clinical expertise.The expectations of the mentee, on the other hand, are to be genuinely committed to the opportunity, and to be open-minded and open to feedback, recognizing that they don’t have all the answers.
Your nurses are an investment and what better way to gain from that then by providing them with the opportunity to show you value them and the important work they do day in and day out.

For more information on mentor programs visit: Mastering Nurse Mentoring

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