Conflict

I am a nursing student who has just finished my preceptorship. While doing my preceptorship i heard the employees complaining about how there nurse manager will not hire more staff to cover the patient load and there have been three nurses put in their notice. This problem has been brought up in several meetings but nothing is getting done. How do your staff meetings go about to resolve conflicts:o

It may help you to think about the organization as a whole. The department and its manager do not exist in a vacuum. Is there a sudden increase in census? Is it attributable to some temporary factor or is it a gradual increase which now warrants a new permanent position? Is there money in the budget for this? Budgets generally flow on an annual cycle, and getting an additional FTE (full-time equivalent) unfortunately requires more than a snap of someone's fingers.

I'm not there - I can't possibly say if the department manager agrees that there is a need but is unable to advertise and fill the position right now ... for any one of 100 reasons ... or if the manager does not agree that an additional nurse is needed. Your co-workers will hopefully present their side backed up with actual data -- daily census numbers, the number of patients assigned to each nurse, overtime pay hours, sentinel events, etc. But even this professional approach does not guarantee that the manager or his/her superiors will see it that way. This is Large Organization 101.

I'm saying that there is more to "resolving conflict" than simply telling people what they want to hear in a staff meeting.

Good luck to you as you start your career. :)

Our staff meetings cause more problems than they actually solve. We have facility staff meetins and then we have what is called "Neighborhood Meetings" which is unit meetings. Everyone calls them gripe sessions because mostly people go in there and complain about patient ratios, fellow workers, call-offs, ect and then nothing is done or resolved.

Try talking with your manager and see what their perspective is. Do they personally think there is not a need for more staff or is it upper management looking to cut costs however they can cut them? Sometimes the unit managers hands are tied and they just don't want to go bad mouthing their bosses. Can you and fellow nurses get together and look at the schedule to see what could be done, come up with a plan and go united to management about it?