Addressing Burnout Among Preceptors and Impact of Unit Issues on Patient Care
For this assignment, you will review the case study and prompts below. You will then write a short (2 page for the body) paper answering the prompts utilizing evidence from the literature. APA format is required for this paper including a title page, body of the paper and reference page. An abstract or executive summary is not required for this paper. Please use level 1 headings for this paper to help organize the flow (APA headings info here (Links to an external site)
Case Study:
You are a nurse manager in a busy emergency department. You have been working in this department for almost 10 years now and have been in your leadership role for the previous five years. Recently, the hospital you work for has undergone major policy changes in regards to RN staffing. Due to these policy changes, your unit is experiencing a high turnover of experienced nurses, which has resulted in a high number of new to service and new graduate nurses. You are currently fully staffed yet the experienced nurses left in the department have shared with you that they are feeling burnout from the constant flow of new nurses needing preceptors. You have also noticed that unit morale overall is down, there are increased call-offs from staff and there has been increased incivility in the workplace. You are concerned that if things don't improve on the unit, that more staff will leave.
Answer the following questions in your short paper:
Discuss how a nurse manager or leader can impact the culture of a struggling unit when changes made at the organization level may be causing distress and unrest among staff.
In your role as a nurse manager for this unit, what is the first thing you would do to address the current issues the unit is facing? Support this intervention with evidence from the literature. (For example, if you were first going to address the burnout of preceptors, you would include an article about best practices to support preceptors)
What possible effects can an unit's culture (and the issues it is facing) have on patient care delivery? Support this with evidence from the literature
If you were a staff nurse on this unit, how can you use your leadership skills to impact patient care and the culture of the unit?
Identify two "pearls of wisdom" from this week's learning materials (articles, PowerPoints, video) that are applicable to the case scenario above.
Evidence for this paper needs to include 2 sources (one from outside course materials), that are from within the previous 5 years. A reminder of what a scholarly, credible and timely source is can be found here.
Unit Culture
Student Name
Institutional Affiliation
Date
Unit Culture
Impacting Unit Culture
Nurses play a critical role in the healthcare setting. Without nurses, it is impossible to run a healthcare system. A nurse manager or leader can make changes to make the working environment suitable for the nurses. When changes at the organizational level are causing distress to the workforce, nursing leaders can intervene to help the management understand the adverse effects of their decisions. As the link between the management and the nursing staff, nurse managers can mediate the two parties and allow them to come to an agreement, making the workplace a better place.
Addressing Burnout Among Preceptors
I would start by addressing the issue of burnout among the preceptors. The constant flow of new nurses has increased the workload for preceptors and hence the burnout that has resulted in the increased turnout among them. According to Stimpfel & Dickson (2020), a majority of the aging nurses have challenges about inflexible schedules and long working hours, which makes it challenging to attend to their duties. The researchers further demonstrate that organizations with flexible scheduling like partial shifts or part-time posts can retain aging nurses and have them train the incoming nurses. I would implement partial shifts of four to six hours for the preceptors to ensure that they have adequate time to train the new nurses while also attending to their duties.
Impact of Unit Issues on Patient Care
The high nurse turnover and preceptor burnout can reduce the quality of patient care. The high turnover among experienced nurses leaves the unit with new nurses who may not have the required experience (Dewanto & Wardhani, 2018). As the new nurses attend to the patient, they may not appropriately handle patients with increasing complexity and multiple comorbidities. Preceptor burnout means that the new nurses will not receive appropriate training on how to handle patients. As a result, the new nurses will not be able to perform their duties as...