and organizing
team member roles. Participants talked about nurses
directing and supervising others as well as delegating
tasks to more effectively coordinate their team’s health
care delivery efforts. A nurse provided an example of a
colleague who exhibits leadership by directing team
members’ roles in an emergency situation:
She’ll take the leadership role in that if it is very
chaotic, she’ll give direction in a bartering sense.
dCan you go out and call the physician?T dWould
you be able to hand me the suction or could you
suction while I bag?T So she asks questions, but
she also barters [to direct]. She calms the
situation by giving it some order. If she feels that
things aren’t being handled in the best manner,
then that’s when she’ll be a little more direct
because someone has to bring order back to
what’s going on.
Leadership also means consistently communicating
with the various members of the health care team so
that each member is clear on individual roles and
duties. For example, a nurse explained that a true
professional keeps team members in the loop by
meeting with them individually at the beginning of
the shift and alerting team members of special situations
or circumstances.
Participants also talked about coordination from the
perspective of mentoring medical residents, new nurses,
and PCAs. Interviewees talked about how much they
appreciated nurses teaching them new procedures and
said mentoring is a characteristic that identifies a
professional nurse. One nurse specifically mentioned
charge nurses who come to the patient bedside with
novice nurses to btalk you throughQ a procedure bto
make you feel comfortable so the next time you can do
it on your own.Q A unit coordinator echoed these
comments by providing an example of how she
mentored medical residents:
Let’s say I have a patient and he’s had trauma and
he’s bleeding. I may have to convince this person,
often times it’s a resident, that it’s in the best
interest of the patient to be checking his hemoglobin.
I may give him the different reasons why I
think it’s appropriate to do a hemoglobin test and
see if I can do it. We try to teach them and guide
them along and let them see from our point of
view, from our experience.
In addition to mentoring or teaching less experienced
team members, coordination also means encouraging
input from others and acknowledging contributions so
that team members feel valued. This communication
skill increases participation in decision making from
others and creates team ownership regarding patient
care. A unit coordinator recounted a situation in which
a nurse affirmed a PCA’s attempt to solve a patient
care problem:
We were trying to come up with solutions on
how to get this baby to empty its bladder. There
were four or five of us bouncing ideas off each
other