When AONE launched a new year-long nurse management fellowship program, the goal was to help nurse managers develop the skills and attributes they need to thrive in their leadership responsibilities.
The nurse fellows gather for four, week-long educational sessions, during which they learn a wide range of business management, leadership, and professional development skills. Each fellow must also complete a capstone project that relates to the fellowship curriculum. For many AONE nurse fellows, the most profound benefit is the inspiration that comes from networking with their peers and interacting with some of the most influential leaders in nursing.
The Business of Caring recently caught up with three graduates of the 2008 fellowship class to find out what they learned and how the program benefited them. Below are their stories.
DeAnna Hawkins, RN, MSN
Shortly after DeAnna Hawkins, a nurse at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, finished the AONE fellowship, she was named clinical director for the hospital’s inpatient hematology/oncology department.
“The fellowship really stretched me beyond what I thought my potential was, and that’s one of the reasons why I accepted the job,” says Hawkins.
Hawkins, who says she “fell into nursing” a decade ago, was convinced by a senior leader at the hospital to apply for the fellowship program. Being identified as an emerging leader was its own honor, says Hawkins, and that motivated her to pursue the opportunity despite a lack of confidence that she would be chosen.
One of the primary benefits from the fellowship experience: Getting to know nurses from around the country, learning that they face similar challenges—and seeing how willing they are to help other nurses.
“This opportunity stretched me beyond Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s walls. I was able to network with so many different people who not only face similar professional challenges but who wanted to share what they’ve learned, and willingly offered themselves as a support system,” says Hawkins. “I realized, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can do this!’”
In addition to the sessions, each fellowship participant was required to plan and implement a process improvement project at his or her home hospital. Hawkins’ project addresses the chronic shortage of healthcare workers by recruiting and training current Cincinnati Children’s employees—for example, food service workers or secretaries—to fill nursing and allied health positions.
“We put them on a healthcare career pathway that targets our in-demand positions here at Children’s: nursing, respiratory therapy, surgical techs,” she says. “This not only benefits the hospital; it also benefits our employees who are already committed to Cincinnati Children’s because they are able to grow professionally and socio-economically.”
The program expands on an earlier federal welfare-to-work initiative in which Cincinnati Children’s hired single mothers into entry-level jobs after their training at a local technical school. Currently, more than 100 student employees are being trained in the clinical skills necessary to fulfill important patient care jobs.
The program holds such promise that the hospital has received state and federal grants to support a clinical instructor to support the student training. “We are basically growing our own future workforce,” says Hawkins.
Hawkins intends to develop a mini-leadership program for her own employees to share lessons from the fellowship experience. One of the most significant lessons came from a session on conflict engagement and active learning in which Phyllis Beck Kritek, RN PhD, discussed how issues of power and lack of conflict management hurts professional relationships and healthcare delivery. In another session, AONE CEO Pamela A. Thompson, RN, MS, FAAN, presented a structured support system for nurse leaders that allows for action-oriented problem-solving.
“It provided me a new way to look at problem solving that removes the pressure of fixing every problem that is brought to my attention,” says Hawkins. “The leaders really challenged us about not always needing to provide the right answers, but that problem solving involves asking the right questions.”
Hawkins also brought back a new perspective on her own potential. One of the leadership development presenters at a fellowship session was a dynamic speaker whose personality profile reveals her to be a natural introvert—just like Hawkins. The chance to visit with the speaker personally helped Hawkins see herself in a new light.
“The sky is the limit for me in nursing,” says Hawkins. “I’m going to have an impact on health care as well as the nursing profession.”
Marie Devlin, ADN
After 29 years as a registered nurse, Marie Devlin, ADN, was excited at the opportunity to learn new skills and perspectives through the AONE fellowship.
As a patient service manager at Yale-New Haven Hospital, a large teaching hospital in New Haven, Conn., Devlin manages a 14-bed surgical ICU, a nine-bed step-down unit, and an 18-bed surgical trauma unit.
“I was struggling with how to manage units during a nursing shortage, how to stay on top of the regulatory pressures, and why I felt a little disconnected from my staff,” she says.
And then she got to know more than 25 new peers from around the country during the four sessions of the AONE Nurse Manager Fellowship. “And I found out everyone else felt the same way too sometimes,” she says.
Devlin, like many of her fellowship peers, is a member of the Baby Boom generation responsible for managing workers in the so-called X and Y generations. “I had read articles—there are lots of articles on generational differences—but putting it into practice as a manager was a challenge,” says Devlin, who manages about 120 employees. “I didn’t really know if anyone else was struggling, but when I went into the fellowship, I learned everyone was struggling.”
She sees a difference in values between nurses in the baby boom generation and those younger nurses who are so desperately needed. “How do you give them the types of rewards and recognition that they want, not necessarily what I might seek as a baby boomer?” says Devlin. “And how do you engage that workforce so that they stay at your hospital and can become very productive?”
Training she received during the fellowship sessions allowed Devlin to step away from her own perspective and look at situations from the point of view of a Generation X or Y member.
For example, she recognizes that baby boomers value relationships built through group work and are accustomed to working on committees as a way to accomplish tasks; indeed, relationships and committee service are seen as significant enough that nurses sometimes work on their own time. She learned that members of the younger generation of nurses prefer projects that have clearly defined endpoints.
“Now that I’ve heard about some experiences that my peers have had, I have been able to come back and look at this in a totally different way, and I’ve been much more successful in engaging the nurses into the different projects for the unit,” she says. “This has shifted me, and it’s shifted the way I manage my unit.”
The fellowship not only helped Devlin understand her younger workforce; it helped her understand herself better. Through personality profiling and assessment exercises, she learned her strengths, weaknesses and passions. She calls the experience a turning point. “I came out of this being able to do a review of myself, and it has changed the direction of my career,” Devlin says.
Devlin is inspired to stay in the health care sector, possibly in a new platform—hospital administration, consulting health care policy are a few options—that allows her to increase her impact.
“I realized one of the things I love about my job—even now—is having staff be successful in their projects and driving patient care to a level of excellence,” she says.
Brian Selig, RN, BSN, MHA, CEN, CNA-BC
Brian Selig, RN, BSN, MHA, CEN, CNA-BC, has spent his 10-year nursing career entirely in emergency medicine, including three years as a flight nurse, and always at the University of Kansas Hospital.
He currently serves as the hospital’s manager of emergency services, and he also manages the hyperbaric medicine department and the medical services at Kansas Speedway, a nearby NASCAR racing track.
His experience in the AONE Nurse Manager Fellowship program may change that. “I really found this passion for getting involved in the policy area,” says Selig. “I was very committed to nursing before, and I still am. But I think it would be very nice to have more people out there advocating on the behalf of patients and nurses.”
How he will position himself in that role remains to be seen, but Selig’s fellowship experience reinforced his goal to expand his influence within his own hospital and within the nursing profession. “Right now I’m finding ER things that I am passionate about, things I want to fight for,” he says.
His fellowship project has provided an excellent platform. As part of the application, each aspiring fellow must propose a project that would develop his or her leadership skills. The project also must have a bottom-line impact on his or her hospital that, at a minimum, covers the $6,000 fellowship tuition.
“We spent a lot of time discussing our projects (with other AONE fellows and faculty members), and we brought everything back to our hospitals,” he says. Selig proposed a project to increase ED throughput by identifying bottlenecks and finding ways to speed a patient’s movement from the ambulance to inpatient treatment. “My project ended up being much bigger than I ever thought it would be,” he says. “That has been my focus for the whole year and we are seeing our patient numbers improve.”
To be specific, the University of Kansas Hospital has cut its ambulance diversion rate by half, and the number of patients who left without being see has also decreased by at least 50 percent. What’s more, the ED has increased its nursing staff by 30 percent, making it almost fully staffed.
While Selig’s focus has been improving patient flow through the emergency department, that process inevitably identify throughput issues in other parts of the hospital. That led to a hospital-wide initiative to work on patient throughput; Selig serves on the hospitalwide committee that is identifying and implementing ways to break log jams that delay patient movement through the system.
“This was more successful than I could ever imagine,” says Selig. “There’s so much that we’re working on—it’s crazy.”
Selig, who manages about 100 employees, was encouraged to participate in the fellowship by his chief nursing officer. Two of the four sessions were timed to coincide with major healthcare leadership conferences—the AONE’s national meeting and the American Hospital Association’s annual meeting in San Diego.
“It gave us an opportunity to network with some of the premier leaders in nursing and in healthcare on a very intimate level, to learn from them and learn about different areas of healthcare administration and how we can grow,” he says.
Seeking 2010 Fellows
Applications for the 2010 AONE Nurse Manager Fellowship year will be due in summer 2009. Applicants must be an AONE member with at least one year experience as a nurse manager. For more information, see www.aone.org.