Unit-based Shared Governance

We have been working on this for 2 years and my biggest comment is that you must have management buyin or it will fail, next you need staff buyin, it will not be shared governance if it is 3 staff members doing all the work and they are the only one attending the meetings, If you have that in place go for it and be patient, it will take time to reap the benefits but in the long run has been good for my unit.

We have started. I think the easiest way to get started is with your unit based councils. Elect a chairperson, vote on council members and begin addressing things in your unit that could be improved. As a council you can decide how you want to vote on everything, whether its is just the council or getting consensus from your unit. You can start with monthly meetings, keep and distribute minutes. Good luck!

Thank you! We just did this last week, and it is falling into place piece by piece. The biggest obstacle is the people that do not want to be involved.

One of the most helpful things is if your RN manager supports it and schedules people to make the meeting. I try to get the message across to people they are getting paid their regular salary to sit in a meeting and no pt care, sometimes this works. Scheduling ends up being an issue, hard to find that perfect time for three different shifts to meet. We have a core that show up. Once you find agenda items that people are interested it should pick up interest.