Team leader assignment

[pockunit, ADN, RN]

Everyone in my clinical group has to take a turn as team leader for a shift. I wonder if any of you have a similar assigment, and how you handled it. I'm pretty nervous.

[Nurse Kyles, BSN, RN]

I had to switch off as leader in my nurse management clinical. I was pretty nervous at first too. I had four total people in my group who each had 2 patients. When I was leader for the day, I didn't have any patients of my own. Instead, I had to briefly prep on all the patients of my team members. The leader helped the team members with assessments, performed the third med check with them, and went with them for med administration. Basically, as the leader, I just helped everyone out with whatever they were doing. I typed up a sheet with brief info about each patient. The info included meds and times, code status, major medical dx, appointments, and priority assessments.I also left room on that sheet to take report. At the beginning of the shift I got report on my team's patients, and gave report to my team. We then went over a game plan. My prep work gave me a pretty good idea of a timeline. A few adjustments had to be made throughout the day, but it went pretty smooth overall.