Step It Up: You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Today’s Nurse Manager has to balance many roles.  The pressure of managing budget, staffing and the latest HCAHPS scores can cause the best manager to feel overwhelmed.  Concern for quality of care and outcomes can sometimes be pushed to the bottom of the list.  While nurses are trained to be concerned with the whole patient, real life can make this task difficult at best.

            Busy nurse managers must ask:  How do you know what you don’t know?  Nurses are moving toward evidence-based practice.  Udod & Care (2006) looked at the leaders’ role in implementing evidence-based practice.   Nurses were called to practice through evidence by Polit & Beck (2008).  How do nurse managers find the time to research the evidence and implement it to practice?  Who can look at what the latest practice guidelines and journals call for? 

            This presentation will discuss how the unit-based Nurse Practitioner can support the nurse manager in stepping up the nursing practice on the unit through evidence-based projects and mentoring of unit staff to a higher level of professionalism. There is no limit to where a team of the Nurse Manager-Nurse Practitioner-Nurse Educator-Staff Nurse might go.