Non Nurse Managers

Originally posted by luvkidsnurse:

I've been working for and with non-nurse managers over the last six months, who have direct responsibility for managing nurses and directing care in a large outpatient clinic setting. My experience has been unnerving to say the least! Quality of care seems to not be an issue because no one knows enough to address it! Such basics as temperature taking of sick children have been ignored and no one cares (least of all the managers!).

This is my first experience working with non-nurse managers and I find it a VERY disturbing trend for quality patient care.

Any comments on the pros and cons of such managers?

This seems to be a trend in a lot of areas because the business types feel that nurses can't handle the "business" end of health care. I live in the Portland, Oregon area.

Just some food for thought....my sister was a non-nurse manager in an outpatient clinic setting. She managed about 3 nurses, 4 MA's and the physicians (ie - they went to her with concerns regarding billing, etc)

I feel she was able to function in her role just fine. Being a nurse may have helped her a little bit, but basically she was only responsible for staffing, ill-calls, conflict resolution and the daily clinic operations and budgeting. The medical personnell also had no problem reporting to her. Basically, it's not like she couldn't address any of their issues. Nurse issues, MA issues, etc are not unique. The have the same issues as any other profession. I don't feel she was a detriment to the clinic in the least, and neither did her staff.

Originally posted by luvkidsnurse:

I've been working for and with non-nurse managers over the last six months, who have direct responsibility for managing nurses and directing care in a large outpatient clinic setting. My experience has been unnerving to say the least! Quality of care seems to not be an issue because no one knows enough to address it! Such basics as temperature taking of sick children have been ignored and no one cares (least of all the managers!).

This is my first experience working with non-nurse managers and I find it a VERY disturbing trend for quality patient care.

I have found that the non-nurse managers always think they are doing a good job and tend to be rather upset when someone brings up the fact that they are not a nurse. Even when dealing with Human Resource issues their lack of nursing experience is limiting, for instance when deciding what qualifications are important for particular nursing positions and in judging a nurse's responses during employment interviews.

In my particular circumstance some very serious physician practice issues became evident, when I brought these issues to the attention of my non-nurse manager his only concern was whether or not I could continue to work around that physician (which meant my job was in jeopardy for bringing these issues forward). The non-nurse manager felt no sense of urgency to investigate the physician problems because he didn't understand BASIC standards of care. To his credit, he did ask a few questions of other physicians about the care that was delivered by the "problem" physician but since he didn't know what was important he left out much of the pertinent data. It took three more months and several more serious situations before I finally went "around" my non-nurse manager and took the practice issues to a physician leader in our community. His comment was "Oh my God, how lucky we've been that no one has been injured yet". These other problems could have been averted three months earlier if this non-nurse manager had understood what he was hearing.

Any comments on the pros and cons of such managers?

I've been working for and with non-nurse managers over the last six months, who have direct responsibility for managing nurses and directing care in a large outpatient clinic setting. My experience has been unnerving to say the least! Quality of care seems to not be an issue because no one knows enough to address it! Such basics as temperature taking of sick children have been ignored and no one cares (least of all the managers!).

This is my first experience working with non-nurse managers and I find it a VERY disturbing trend for quality patient care.

Any comments on the pros and cons of such managers?

luvkidsnurse

My response is simply "VERY DANGEROUS FOR ALL CONCERNED"

Good luck

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Sheryl

If you enjoy word puzzles come visit me at www.CrosswordsForNurses.com

Hello I have been working for the past 18 months with individuals who are not nurses. My concern is that they don't have a clue as to what we do. Currently I have a registered dietician as a manager, a speech therapist as my director of performance improvement, and a respiratory therapist as another manager of various hospital committees. Non of these individuals know what is going on. Nurses in my department are frustrated when they have an issue. They don't seem concerned about nursing issues. However, I will be leaving this organization going to another that has nurses in charge of nurses.