Improving Nursing Education Term Paper

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Nursing Time Management Strategies

By its very nature, the profession of nursing requires effective time management. Nurses are constantly asked to balance the needs of patients and also the demands of administrators as they care for patients and attend to the bureaucratic aspects of their duties. The nursing shortage has made the need for time management particularly acute. Nurses are often overburdened with the care of many patients, whom they must attend to all at the same time while working long shifts. They must budget their time but still dispense high-quality care. With this in mind, the article by Nelson (2010) entitled "Helping new nurses set priorities" argues that time management skills must be a component of the training of all new nurses. During the first critical years of practice, the nurse develops the habits and assumptions for how she will govern her time.

In general, "orientees' time-management skills improve as they develop routines and get familiar with the facility's policies, procedures, and supply locations" (Nelson 2010). However, proper training can do much to speed the process. Nursing students must transition to an environment in a classroom where one health issue can be examined at a time vs. The real, everyday world of practice when they are confronted by many urgent needs at once. This transition is emotional as well as logistical, as nurses must learn to handle stress while simultaneously learning to prioritize tasks as urgent, important, routine, and less pressing.

It must be stressed early on that "safety over speed" is the priority (Nelson 2010). One analogy made for new nurses is that their pacing must be like a beating heart: the heart must keep a steady rhythm and even though the heart must speed up to deal with an urgent situation it must slow down again. Nurses cannot operate in constant 'flight or fight' mode, or else they will burn out very quickly.

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Ironically, high rates of burnout are one reason that the nursing profession suffers a shortage today -- poor prioritization and burnout due to being overwhelmed with tasks thus becomes a viscous cycle. The more quickly nurses become burned out and leave the profession, the more oppressed existing nurses feel regarding the demands made upon their time. Questions which nurses must ask themselves to engage in effective time management include: "What are you going to do first? Why?" And "Which is more important? Why?" And "What could happen if you don't do this now?" And "What is most important to the patient?" (Nelson 2010). Asking focused questions regarding the prioritization of their duties enables nurses to engage in effective scheduling.

Another aspect of the stressors of nursing is likely rooted in the fact that there are very high expectations for nurses regarding the level of patient-centered care they are expected to give. According to Jones (2012): "as providers of care, nurses are expected to allocate their time to establish and maintain therapeutic nurse-patient relationships and implement the nursing process to maximize patient outcomes (Foster & Hawkins, 2005; Hagerty & Patusky, 2003). The emphasis is on individualized patient-centered care and time is a resource used to produce care. Nurses and patients want more time devoted to patient care" (Jones 2013). However, finding such time during one's daily rounds can be very challenging.

The nurse is both a professional caregiver but also an employee at an organization which has clear goals to maximize efficiency. To balance this, Jones (2012) introduces a multi-faceted concept of what she calls 'nursing time.' "Nursing time is conceived to exist in three forms -- physical, psychological, and sociological. Physical nursing time is measured by the clock and assigned a number. It is exemplified by commonly used staffing metrics such as hours….....

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