The Nurse Managers Role In Physician Collaboration — страница 3

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outcomes. The third step in the process would be to empower the nursing staff with beliefs that fulfill their higher order of needs such as achievement, self-actualization, concern for others, and affiliation. Because of nursings normative behavior as passive, caring, and subservient the staff must learn to overcome expectations to identify with this role expectation. The nurse manager must support, coach, and instill a sense of empowerment into her staff in order for them to depart from those stereotypes. The idea is to fill the nursing staff with a sense of self-confidence and to lose thoughts of self-doubt, inequality, and subservience. To implement this new paradigm of nurse empowerment can be a challenge for the nurse manager within any typical hospital beaurocracy. That is

Collaboration 8 why it is important to choose the correct style of leadership to guide the staff through this process of empowering or transforming. The leadership model best suited for this type of task and the most congruent with empowerment is the transformational model. Transformational leadership is a process in which leaders seek to shape and alter the goals of followers. Cassidy & Koroll (1994) describe the process as incorporating the dimensions of leader, follower, and situation. The leader motivates followers by identifying and clarifying motives, values, and goals that contribute to enhancing shared leadership and autonomy. Transformational leaders are usually charismatic so they enhance energy and drive people towards a common vision and shifting the focus of

control from leaders to followers. It is the transformational nurse manager that will be able to empower her workers to facilitate nurse-physician collaboration, for the common good of the patient. The nurse manager using transformational leadership would set the direction for the rest of the unit to follow. She would be able to charismatically appeal to the medical staff as well as the nursing staff and create collaboration beyond the daily frustrations of arguing about to which domain a certain patient care issues belong. Further more the nurse manager would have to work hard at decreasing the seeds of distrust and disrespect that have been planted between our colleagues in medicine, and vice versa with nursing. Corley (1998) described several behaviors that the transformation

nurse manager would need to exhibit in supporting her staff in such a role transition. The behaviors are as follows: stimulate creativity, establish an environment that facilitates team work and learning, implement change, motivate staff to assume increased responsibility, help Collaboration 9 develop employees awareness of organizational goals, delegate responsibility appropriately, communicate openly and directly with staff, and collaborate with peers. The significance of these behaviors in facilitating empowerment is seen as fundamental to creating collaborative practice environment. The final step in the process is to evaluate its effectiveness. In order to provide a clear and concise evaluation of the collaborative process one must look at all structural elements and all

indicators of collaboration as previously discussed. Once accurate measures are identified and assessed the collaborative practice committee can discuss their outcomes and effectiveness. Over time, nurses and physicians may be able to articulate more clearly the changes in their practice and beliefs that have been affected by collaborating on patient care. Several of these key areas to examine would be: length of stay, patient and provider satisfaction, number of return visits, and changes in supply costs. Improvements in any of these areas could be due to favorable results from collaborative practice between nurses and physicians. In conclusion, many problems related to nurse physician collaboration are typically blamed on physicians. However the reality is that many of the

barriers can be traced back to nursing as well. Collaboration is a process by which members of various disciplines share their expertise. Accomplishing this requires that these individuals understand and appreciate what it is that each professional domain contributes to the whole . The nurse manger plays a pivotal role in establishing an environment that is conducive to collaboration among the disciplines. Although it is a difficult road to follow the benefits of an effective collaborative unit out-weigh the difficulties of establishing Collaboration 10 such a practice. However, the nurse manager has an excellent vehicle for which to begin her journey and that is the use of transformation leadership, an empowering tool for change. Collaboration 11 REFERENCES Baggse, J.G. &