Strategies to Transform Nursing Professionals into Effective Managers

Nursing professionals play a critical role as primary caregivers across the healthcare system’s three tiers, i.e., primary, secondary, and tertiary, especially in the current pandemic context. Research has shown that effective nursing practices of front line nurses contribute towards positive health outcomes, primarily reductions in mortality and morbidity in healthcare facilities. 

Effective nursing practices are based on a structured and active system of management run by the nurse managers and supervisors. Like every other organization, healthcare facilities also depend on management and leadership to steer the entire workforce. Front line nurses have been heralded for their efforts in battling the pandemic. But unfortunately, the nursing management system has been criticized by various stakeholders, including nurses themselves. Resource allocation, task delegation, and workload management are critical challenges in the nursing management area. 

Gaps in Nursing Management

Studies have shown that even nurses with high clinical knowledge and skills struggle in transitioning to managers and supervisors. This issue primarily stems from nursing education’s rigid focus on improving clinical expertise and patient care. While these are essential aspects of a nurse’s career, they’re not all a nurse needs to thrive in today’s dynamic healthcare field. In today’s era, nurses worldwide are donning leadership hats in various domains and specialties. For this purpose, they’re compelled to develop managerial and administrative expertise alongside leadership skills. Healthcare organizations can encourage their nursing staff to enroll in the nursing administration master’s degree to hone essential managerial skills. 

The program aims to enhance nursing professionals’ capacities as supervisors by imparting guidance on structured supervision, analytics, and financial management. Programs like these are deliberately designed as short-term online programs to accommodate nursing professionals’ busy schedules and allow them to pursue higher education alongside work.

Educational programs such as these enhance nurse managers’ capacity as supervisors, decision-makers, and effective administrators. 

Structured Supportive Supervision 

Structured supportive supervision is an approach in nursing management endorsed by the WHO to improve nurses’ performances in various healthcare systems. This strategy emanates from Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) which is deployed to lay out five critical steps through which nurse managers can improve nursing practices. SCT suggests that human beings learn behaviors through a combination of personal (observation and cognition) and environmental (presence of role models and social support) factors. 

Generally, when nurses transition into nursing managers or supervisors, they draw upon their own experiences to learn on the job. Since most frontline nurses do not have proper management training, they often struggle in making a successful transition. Educational programs for nurse managers teach and emphasize this supervision strategy to birth and foster a culture of succession planning in the nursing system. In nursing, structured, supportive supervision from nursing supervisors, based on these concepts, can significantly improve nurses’ knowledge and skills, leading towards enhanced nursing practices. Structured supportive supervision achieves this by mapping a pathway between nurses receiving supervision and nurses upskilling their nursing practices. 

• The first step in the pathway is an increment in the level of facilitation that nurse managers and supervisors extend to their respective nurses. Addressing and upskilling frontline nurses’ capacity as caregivers and managers are possible through their seniors’ support. Nurse managers and supervisors should provide social support to nurses by facilitating inpatient care. Facilitation would include consistent clinical mentoring, guidance, and on-the-job training. 
• Increased facilitation leads to the second step, which is modeling. In this step, nurse managers and supervisors present themselves as role models for nursing practices, including patient-care and administrative tasks. This relationship makes it imperative for nurse managers and supervisors to lead by example by bringing passion and energy into their work to give their staff a benchmark to model themselves after. The embodiment of nurse managers and supervisors as role models in nursing care leads to nurses vicariously learning clinical and patient care and management and administration from their seniors. 
• The third step is incentive motivation which is the provision of appreciation and feedback by nurse managers and supervisors to improve their practices. Nursing supervisors should appreciate by providing written and verbal feedback that details areas of appreciation to enhance their clinical practice and patient care further. Per the theory, nurses attain increased self-confidence and self-efficacy to help their supervisors and patients.
• This increased self-confidence and self-efficacy leads to the final step of self-regulation. Self-regulation dictates that a person in any given profession is in the best position to manage themselves without reliance on external sources. Nursing professionals at this step are well-aware of their professional strengths and limitations. They can set and mentor their own goals for performance. They can also direct themselves to operate independently as self-regulating nursing practitioners and become prime candidates for becoming nurse supervisors and managers.

Key Management Areas

The critical management learning areas for nursing professionals are human resource management, finance, and administration.

• Under human resource management, nursing professionals learn organizational management, structured recruitment processes, succession planning, and staff management. It enables them to hire new nurses efficiently and learn ideal practices for managing their current roster time and efforts. They also learn to develop a plan of learning for their staff. It ensures that they acquire knowledge and skills beneficial to their careers and the nursing system, on the whole, as a unit that is constantly learning and improving. 
• Under finance and administration, nurses learn the critical tenets of procurement and logistics management, scheduling, and records management. These are critical in improving nurse managers’ capacity in using proper approaches and management information systems (MIS). It allows them to manage and allocate resources amongst their staff for adequate treatment and patient care. Records management is a consistently highlighted issue in nursing systems, especially in low-to-middle income countries. It leads to poor case management as cases and records aren’t accurately tracked. Furthermore, aspiring nurse managers also learn tools and practices for budgeting, planning, and forecasting for their department.

Final Thoughts

While nurses juggle various responsibilities, from overlooking patients and managing paperwork to assisting physicians, they require managerial competency to boost performance. Now, nurses must sharpen leadership skills, develop managerial expertise, and work on emotional intelligence. Nursing professionals with these skills are highly valued as they possess the clinical, managerial, and supervisory expertise required to develop and manage an efficient and organized nursing system.