Journal 8

It was a typical Monday morning with my preceptor and it was my last day with her. We started our day in surgery for four hours to observe how things are done over there. We watched a procedure together. The main objective for this was to help my preceptor understand and observe for herself some of the issues reported to her by some staff and surgeons. She also felt she had to step in to help the director of surgery who was frustrated and stressed out. My preceptor stated that she is there to advocate for her directors and staff, offer logistics to the staff and let them know that she is there for them. She also wants to have a better understanding of issues in order to offer better solutions. She said that she was going to shadow the director for four hours every morning for three days to get a better grasp of all pending issues in order to offer proper solutions. On the first day, she wrote down all the problems she observed. It is just unfortunate I would not be around to observe her find solutions to the problems.
After our visit to the surgery department we came to the office and went through her calendar. The secretary made changes and cancelled some appointments because she was so tight that day. We had a meeting with the director of education on winter internship program. We discussed conducting interviews for interns, interview tools, performance assessment tool, care plan and documentation (ways to help nurses document effectively) and Decisional Involvement Scale. Decisional Involvement Scale is a tool used to assess staff and managers’ degree of decisional involvement and readiness for shared governance. In addition it identifies gaps between staff’s actual and preferred degree of decisional involvement. The nursing leaders use this tool to pinpoint areas into which staffs seek greater input as well as areas in which they would prefer less involvement. They talked about proposed date, readiness, education plan, strategic review, and deadline to submit the share governance for review before the actual meeting. I also had the opportunity to sit in an interview for hiring a new OR Charge Nurse/Supervisor. She was asked a lot of questions and was a nice learning opportunity for me.
I have really enjoyed my management clinical with my preceptor; she is a mentor to me. It has been a challenging and learning experience that has changed my perceptions about those in management. I hope everybody in nursing school gets this management experience.