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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?

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?

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

Tips for interviewing travel candidates

By Jeff on Feb 06, 2009 in Featured, Travel Nurses

When you are working with a healthcare staffing company, whether it is a travel nursing company or travel allied health company, it is important to place the proper emphasis on interviewing the travel nursing or therapist candidate. Filling your nursing or unit needs is far too important to start it off with out a great interview process.

For starters the speed in which you get the interview done is very important. The best travel nurses or therapists are always in demand, especially right now when there are not as many jobs for them to choose from and an abundance of candidates for a smaller number of jobs. Remember they still have many companies talking to them and you want to make sure the best candidates do not get away from you and compromise your ability to deliver quality patient care.

Once you have reviewed the resume and decided to interview the travel nurse, therapist, or tech here are some tips to help it go smoother:

Have a clear understanding of what you are looking for, list the skills, personality and moral traits you want in a candidate.

Have a list of questions ready, Use the same one on every interview and develop it as you go.

Take the time to build a good relationship with the travel nurse, therapist, or tech candidate so they feel more comfortable and are able to demonstrate their true qualifications.

Ask open ended and situational questions. Avoid yes/no questions to really see want the travel candidate knows and what they are really like and how they will react in situations they will be faced with.

See if the nurse or allied health candidate has any questions of their own, it is a good sign when they do as it shows someone who has done prior research and was paying attention during the interview.

A succesful interview really comes down to preparation, so do your homework and take the time to get the interview done right the first time. It will save you time and money in the long run if the travel nurse or allied health professionals is not a good fit.