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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?

Work life balance for nurse managers

By Jeff on Jun 05, 2009 in Featured, Hospital Management, Hospital Staffing, Nursing Staff Management

We have seen a lot of interest in nursing staff burnout lately, both through searches that find this blog and our other blog (TravelNursingBlogs.com), but also in the media and healthcare blogosphere in general, and in nursing forums and social networks. It is obvious that the economy and change in working conditions for nurses is taking its toll and nurses may be nearing the tipping point, when their physical and emotional health concerns outweigh their financial concerns. Let’s face it, people can only work 50-60 hours a week for so long.

But this post is about you the nurse manager. How many hours are you working? Are you sacrificing your work life balance at the expense of your emotional and physical well being? If you are, stop. You may be hurting patient care just as much as your burned out staff.

How? As a their manager, your nurses take their behavioral cues from you, so if you are stressed and burned out, that is going to impact them and the patient care they give. It is pretty simple:
Happy Manager + Happy Staff = Happy Patient

And we all know that happy patients come back to your hospital and recommend you to their family and friends, increasing hospital revenue and making your hospital CFO and CMO happy. Plus when hospital revenue is up, so many other good things happen, new programs that help patients can be implemented, additional staff can be brought on to improve nurse to patient ratios and so many other side benefits that come with being a financially sound hospital.

So the real question is how do you achieve that work life balance as a nurse manager with so many people relying on you, your spouse, your kids, your parents, your employees? That is where you have to get creative. And where this series should help, over the next couple of posts I will be bringing you a series of articles to help you find work/life balance as a nursing manager. Stay tuned.