Nursing Leadership/management Descriptive Paper

Leadership/Management Descriptive Project

Methods of communication between and nurse and other healthcare workers can be crucial to patient's care, especially because a patient may interact with several different people through the course of treatment and care. Communication can start with something as simple as a handwritten note, email, dictation, or face to face contact. This can create various opportunities for error. Making sure the message is clear; complete is essential in nursing care. Other ways can be the patient transmitting data from one provider to another. That could be at an office visit for a follow up where a patient was hospitalized, and the physician does not have access to that record. I've noticed several ways during clinical how nurses communicate, they have the kardex which is hand written notes on a patients care, each individual nurses and care techs also each have their own "sloppy copies" to facilitate these type of notes. EHR (electronic medical record) doctors notes/new orders, which can be given over the phone. It all kind of starts off as loose pencil notes and then into a database whether that be the actual medical chart, or in the computer.

Methods by which nurses communicate between each other are similar to what was mentioned above. Nurses usually have their "end of shift notes", their information on clipboards (kardex), and then what they have noted in the patient chart throughout their shift. I like the end of shift notes or "report" that is communicated verbally between the nurses as they trade off care. Pros to this are it is personal, and there is room to ask specific questions while the nurse is still there from the previous shift. Cons to this method are it can sometimes be a tedious task when there are dozens of patients on the floor and every one of them is usually getting a new nurse at the end of the shift. This can make it hard for the previous nurse to get out of there, and the new nurse to individualize each and everyone of her patients to whoever (and sometimes it may be more than one nurse) the new person taking care of that patient. I have in particular found this hard during clinical as a student because often my patients don't have the same nurses or previous nurses.

Nurses communicate with other healthcare differently than their family/clients in the sense that the terminology is way more advanced and vocabulary is complex. All the abbreviations and medical terms can make it sound like a completely different language sometimes! But that is true with most occupations, however I think the medical field is way more complex than say cashier at the supermarket.

From the survey that was done for 351 and my personal leadership style, it was hard to define. In some areas I am very driven and pro active. But in other areas that maybe I don't feel as if I have as