What are the tasks only a nurse manager can do? That is the question Keck Hospital of USC in Los Angeles set out to answer when it had all nurse managers and assistant nurse managers meet with the chief nursing officer to list everything they are responsible for on a given day.
"We had huge flip charts all over the room and then we identified those things that only a manager can do, and we looked at all of the tasks that they could be giving to assistant nurse managers through delegation," Ceonne Houston-Raasikh, DNP, RN, chief nursing officer of Keck Hospital, told Becker's.
Coaching, developing schedules for their departments and time card edits were some of the key tasks that surfaced.
"None of our managers are doing that," anymore, she said. "All of that work is consistently delegated to nurse managers."
Optimizing nurse managers' workloads and looking for new opportunities to standardize the workflow is an ongoing priority at the hospital. To continue those discussions, Dr. Houston-Raasikh and other executives at Keck hold listening sessions on a quarterly basis with nurse managers to learn more about how changes to the work environment have progressed, and to determine what additional solutions are needed.