Summary: The Shortage Of Nurse Leaders

This paper aims to address and discuss about the leadership and management of the nurse leader interviewed. This experience was a great opportunity to witness first hand how a nurse leader cultivate and manage their staffs in real life setting. Moreover, it provides a great access to gain insight and knowledge about nurse leaders’ vital responsibilities and role diversities in the organizations they work with. Nurse leaders pay more specific and close attention in handling the staffs and most importantly, patient care.

Slide 1: The expectations of nurses today are higher than ever with goals such as achieving top percentiles in nursing and patient satisfaction, to being among the top leaders in quality outcomes, and to build productive work relationships and environments. Nursing leaders serve as the primary link between staff, physicians, and the community. They are expected to be innovative, highly skilled, possess a certain degree of nursing knowledge, and produce qualified individuals to care for the growing population. According to Lorber, Treven, and Mumel (2016) “nursing leadership is pivotal because nurses represent the most extensive discipline in health care”. Because of this growing need for diversity in leadership and my background in the military, I decided to focus on the MSN Executive Track at Chamberlain College of Nursing.

Research and implementation of evidenced based practice is critical in today’s healthcare However, there are many individuals involved and many steps that must occur for this implementation to occur. Therefore in this week’s discussion, I will explain how the nurse leaders play an important role in promoting Evidenced based practice. I will also discuss strategies that can be utilize when there is a change that occurs due to the implementation of evidenced based practice. I will then describe powers behind an ever-changing healthcare culture, as well as current issues and trends that are occurring. I will then compare and contrast work group cultures to other organizational cultures.

As a nurse administrator, I have a distinct role to play in the healthcare sector. Preparation for this position commences at the graduate level; either masters or doctoral level. Prospective students at graduate level are expected to indicate a variety of roles across healthcare sector as stipulated in the legislative law. Factors such as the nature of the organization and its system of leadership provide credible knowledge that is critical for nursing management roles. As opposed to Gerontology Nurse Practitioners who are expected to have a wide array of technical and hands-on skills

As the nursing programs are losing their most experience faculty due to retirement, others do not want to enroll in education because they can get paid better in the hospitals and the ones who consider being instructors to not had the master’s or docatorate’s levels to prepare them for teaching (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day, 2010). The Carnegie Foundation believes that the number of nurses with appropriate education must be increased to 90% in order to meet the high demands (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day,

Qualified instructors available to teach nursing students in educational facilities are beginning to be a problem within the nation. Most nursing instructors that teach in educational facilities are advanced in their line of work, and many of them are expected to retire within the next five years. New faculty of nursing programs will be in priority when the number of retirees increases (Rosenfeld, 2009).

An aging faculty, administrative constraints, fierce job competitiveness for prime clinical sites among faculty, and non-competitive wages limit nursing schools across the country from accepting all nurse applicants. In addition, new qualified and experienced nurses are not looking to shift or begin their careers in education because the pay is simply not there to support it. “According to the American Association of Critical-Care Nurse’s report on 2014-2015 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing, U.S. nursing schools turned away 68,938 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2014 due to an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints. Almost two thirds of the nursing schools responding to the survey pointed to faculty shortages as a reason for not accepting all qualified applicants into baccalaureate programs” (Rosseter). Is this where the bottleneck is happening? The National Advisory Council on Nurse Education and Practice (NACNEP), issued a report addressing the one factor that limits the nation’s ability to produce more nurses: “the shortage of nurse faculty to educate those who desire to enter the nursing profession”. With retiring educators who belong to the baby boomer’s generation, the struggle for school administrators to find new and qualified faculty will dramatically intensifies over the next ten years. Several strategies for countering a faculty shortage have been brought forward but as Dr. Ada Sue Hinshaw, PhD, explains, this situation will be one of the most challenging concerns of the next decade. “Each nursing program is confronted with the issue of a shortage of nursing faculty and each must treat

There are many skills, traits, and behaviors one must possess in order to be an effective leader. The American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE) has compiled a list of competencies and skills that nurse leaders should be proficient in. The five competency domains identified by AONE (2011) are “communication and relationship building, knowledge of health care environment, leadership skills, professionalism, and business skills” (p. 3). The competency domain I believe is essential for one to possess in order to be an effective executive nurse leader is communication and relationship building. The competencies AONE (2011) listed under the domain communication and relationship building are “effective communication, relationship management, influence of behavior, ability to work with diversity, shared decision-making, community involvement, medical staff relationship, and academic relationships” (p.3). I will discuss how Tom (nurse manager of a psychiatric unit) did not meet these specific characteristics under that domain.

In the increasingly complex, ever changing environment of today’s healthcare, effective leaders are essential to help drive positive change resulting in increased access to care with positive outcomes for as many as possible. In its 2010 report, The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recognized that nurses are well positioned to play a key role in the transformation of our healthcare system in the United States (U.S.) (Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2010). In The Essentials of Doctoral Education for Advanced Nursing Practice, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) specifically identifies organizational and systems leadership as a core competency for advanced

One of the most critical factors is a faculty shortage in nursing programs. This has caused a decreasing number of new nurses and has resulted in thousands of prospective students being turned away. In recent years, it is reported that nursing schools turned away 79,659 qualified applicants (Nursing Shortage, 2016). This was due to an insufficient number clinical sites, clinical preceptors, budget constraints, and number of faculty. Factors contributing to the nursing faculty shortage include, low salaries for educators compared to those in clinical settings, nurses waiting until an older age to advance their education, entering educative roles late in their career, inability to fill open faculty roles, large numbers of currently employed nursing educators retiring (Nursing Shortage,

After reviewing various literature regarding nursing shortages, there is a national problem. Huber speaks about the nursing shortages and discusses various contributors and strategies to fix the issues (2014). The various contributors would be nursing graduate numbers, aging nurses, and nursing recruitment/retention (Huber D. , 2014). There are currently not enough students graduating nursing school, this is due to limited faculty restricting enrollments, more push for bachelor prepared nurses, and minimal school budgets (Huber D. , 2014). For nurse’s demographics, Huber describes it as an aging population with more retiring and the median nursing age increasing (2014). This is described as the graying factor (Huber D. , 2014). Recruitment

Leadership traits associated with nurse executives are honesty, credibility, supportiveness, visibility, and flexibility. Nurse executives analyze nursing functions and empower nurses through participatory decision making, shared governance, and employee involvement. Nurse executives share the vision and goals of the hospital and promote application of a nursing theory into the nursing care delivery system. They anticipate the future of health care and nursing and serve as monitor, role model, and preceptor to lower level management (Upeniecks, 2003). Nurse executives in the Magnet program are required to have advance practice degrees with certification in their specialty (ANCC). Understanding evidence-based management and enabling the use of evidence-based knowledge provides the nurse executive with the tools to improve patient outcomes. The transformational leader will remove barriers to improvement and encourage outcome based thinking. While nurse leaders are charged with questioning the status quo, nurse managers in the transformational approach to leadership are charged with maintaining the status quo.

According to the American Nurses Association (2016), the Council on Graduate Education for Administration in Nursing (CGEAN), the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), and the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE), emphasized “that advanced education and continuing competence are needed for nurse administrators to have the skills required to merge business operations and decision-making with clinical practice and outcomes improvement.” It is true, that Mr. Curtis advocates advancement in education, he advised me to keep reading and to continue learning. Actually, he is a student like us, he is taking a doctorate

Working on a nursing leadership post requires a strong educational background. The most widely accepted way to become a nursing administrator is a Master of Science in Nursing or a Master of Health Administration with an emphasis on leadership, management or administration (Graduatenursingedu.org, 2016). Moreover, the unique qualification that is inherent for the nurse administrators is that they can mix business and leadership skills with their health

In the healthcare field, nursing leaders and managers face consistent issues in their respective practices that force them to alter the way they work and the way they think. In taking on a role as a leader within the field, nursing leaders and managers also take on the role of ensuring that work within an organization runs smoothly regardless of new issues that may arise in the healthcare arena. For instance, in today's healthcare environment, the issues of nurse shortage and nurse turnover have the capacity to alter the healthcare field and many of its respective branches and organizations should these problems not be managed properly by the leaders in the field. In viewing the issue at hand and in discovering how nursing leaders and managers are expected to act, and do act, in order to approach this issues, along with pinpointing the best approach possible to aid this issue, one can better understand which leadership styles are necessary for leaders to function.