Taking Charge with Nurse Leader Education

This is a partner guest blog from Pat Patton, VP, Clinical Health Initiatives (CHI), discussing challenges that frontline nurse leaders face today.

If organizations need compelling reasons to invest in their nurses, they need look no further than the extensive research showing that developing nurses as leaders leads to improvements in employee satisfaction and increases the quality of care, says Pat Patton of Vice President of Nursing Operations of CHI.

While increasing the quality of care provided is reason enough to offer nurse leadership training, it is also important to acknowledge several factors that are driving the need for more efficient and more targeted leadership development among charge nurses:

• Healthcare Staffing Resources—fewer layers of middle management mean that most nurses are their own managers.
• Workforce changes—an aging workforce means more skilled nurses are retiring, creating a workforce of newer graduates that have less career experience.
• Quality of care—critical access hospitals are less likely to have an ICU and also statistically have higher mortality rates, more falls, and more frequent cases of pneumonia and infections all of which point to a need for better trained nurses.
• Payment changes—the movement of an entire healthcare system from volume-based to value-based means a shift in better care, not simply more patients.
• Demographic swings—nursing shortages combined with increasingly high demand for care mean nurses can pick the best work environments and will look for professional development opportunities when choosing an employer.

HealthStream’s Frontline Nurse Leader: A Charge Nurse Program is an online program designed by clinicians at CHI with training expertise from HealthStream that efficiently provides engaging and relevant training for charge nurses, team leaders, shift leaders, and house supervisors. The training leans heavily on real-life case studies and practical applications at the department level in these six modules:

• Communication
• Finance
• Resource management
• Clinical,  technical and regulatory
• Safety
• Career issues in nursing

Developing the leadership skills of a charge nurse in a methodical measured way using relevant, engaging content that is practical and evidence-based leads to  greater employee satisfaction all around while also raising the quality of care and patient satisfaction.

Your nurses need you to invest in them, your patients need the best trained staff you can afford to provide, and your hospital needs a plan to develop a leadership track for nurses.