Authors

  1. Falter, Betty MS, RN, CNAA, BC

Article Content

Issues and Strategies for Nurse Leaders: Meeting Hospital Challenges Today, edited by Robert Porche, Jr. Oakbrook Terrace, Ill, Joint Commission Resources, 2005. 181 pages, soft cover, $75.00.

 

The focus of this book is hospitals as the most complex settings of healthcare. Within the hospital setting, the book focuses on nurse leaders, including nursing directors, frontline nurse managers, nurse executives, and others. The challenges addressed include staffing shortages, increased work demands, outcomes related to patient care, and providing adequate training. Strategies include details on creating a retentive work environment; employing workload measurement systems; improving patient care quality and safety, with a focus on the joint commission's National Patient Safety Goals and priority focus areas; and enhancing competency through education. The book provides sidebars throughout to include facts and figures, statistics and data, and standards connection.

 

The application of information technology is addressed throughout the book, with a particular emphasis on (1) improving communication, clinical decision support, medication management, clinical documentation, and access to information, (2) computer-based courses, education and training in information technology, and electronic data interchange, and (3) implementation of new systems in intensive care units, in scheduling of work shifts, and others. Each strategy is broken down into concise, clear, and easily implemented steps. The case studies are comprehensive yet brief (2 pages). The case study "VA Long Beach Healthcare System: Saving Time With a Computerized Information System", is not only based on a research-based grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality but also explained in nonresearchers' terms, important to nurse leaders needing to understand a rapidly changing, demanding, information-driven healthcare system.

 

This book is good supplemental reading to a nursing department's leadership group. The multiple challenges and strategies facing even the frontline manager today are so many and coming so fast, that a book like this is needed. It helps to lay out those challenges and strategies in a clear and concise manner, allowing us to get our arms around what we need to do. In addition, the book takes standards that may seem ominous on first glance and explains them in achievable terms. Senior leaders directly responsible for implementation of any of these strategies will probably want a more detailed book.

 

Betty Falter, MS, RN, CNAA, BC

 

Falter and Associates, Inc, Tucson, Arizona