The Description of a Potential Crisis
The provision of high-quality nursing services involves many situations that are heavily affected by the human factor. Professionals in nursing sometimes make mistakes due to their knowledge deficiencies, and it can significantly contribute to the emergence of crises. Such situations require nurse leaders to collaborate with specialists at different organizational levels to minimize the negative consequences of nurses’ mistakes or other factors that lead to crises.
Nursing crises, however, are not always caused by particular mistakes in caring for patients; many of them are related to the availability of the staff (Ong & Tan, 2018). Thus, a potential crisis that can occur in my area of practice involves the lack of qualified staff due to a rapid increase in patients coupled with abnormally high turnover rates.
Concerning the underlying causes of the potential crisis, nurses can be willing to leave their jobs due to several reasons. The most common ones relate to business competition in healthcare services, inadequate workloads, toxic relationships between team members, and poor manager-worker communication strategies (Hayward, Bungay, Wolff, & MacDonald, 2016). The potential situation related to the nursing shortage has a variety of negative consequences.
For instance, the absence of experienced specialists disrupts all working processes and leads to patient dissatisfaction, complications, and increases in daily workloads (Pelone, Beighton, Gourlay, & Drennan, 2017). As a result of these changes in the psychological climate, nurses tend to manifest the symptoms of job burnout. Therefore, they become less concentrated on their responsibilities and start making errors related to the administration of medications, some of which can be irreversible. The prevention of such crises in particular healthcare organizations involves the concerted efforts of HR specialists, hospital managers, and nurse leaders. Taking into account the long-term consequences of employee turnover and the absence of quick fixes, this potential crisis requires an in-depth examination.
The Rationale for Choosing Three Items
The first item related to the ability to design comprehensive communication plans with specific steps was chosen due to my experiences with planning. I regard the necessity of steps that allow tracking “the progress being made” as the key priority in leadership, and improving these skills can make me a more effective crisis manager (AONE, 2016, p. 1). I believe that essential leadership qualities include attention to detail, and this is why the item has been chosen.
The second item refers to nurse leaders’ need to see the global picture. The ability to approach difficult situations “from a systems theory perspective” and engage a variety of stakeholders is critical to long-term success (AONE, 2016, p. 2). Additionally, I recognize the great role of this area in my further skill improvement since I lack experience in solving large-scale crises.
As for the last area, it emphasizes leaders’ need to “utilize readiness training and education using mock scenarios” and other methods (AONE, 2016, p. 2). The measures related to the focus area help develop crisis readiness in healthcare organizations. I would like to improve these skills to be able to organize other people’s work in case of unwanted events.
Two Methods to Improve Competency
Focus Area 1
- Collaborate with other nurse leaders who design communication plans and adopt their experiences;
- Apply the algorithms for developing communication plans found in academic studies.
Focus Area 2
- Learn more about hierarchy at the workplace and related institutions and present these relationships graphically;
- Use analytical findings to identify the groups of stakeholders and their key needs to facilitate stakeholder engagement.
Focus Area 3
- Use mock scenarios and consider feedback from nurses to improve them;
- Make sure that all staff members can evaluate resource availability to make low-level decisions in case of emergency.
References
AONE. (2016). AONE guiding principles: Role of the nurse leader in crisis management. Web.
Hayward, D., Bungay, V., Wolff, A. C., & MacDonald, V. (2016). A qualitative study of experienced nurses’ voluntary turnover: Learning from their perspectives. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 25(9-10), 1336-1345.
Ong, Y. H., & Tan, Y. H. (2018). The development of a skills taxonomy for nursing crisis management. Clinical Simulation in Nursing, 25, 6-11.
Pelone, F., Beighton, C., Gourlay, S., & Drennan, V. M. (2017). Interventions to reduce adult nursing turnover: A systematic review of systematic reviews. Open Nursing Journal, 11, 108-123.