I am an assistant chief nurse at the critical care unit at General Hospital. I have worked as a critical care nurse for 9 years now. This has been one of the best areas in medical-surgical nursing since I have been able to handle patients who need total care. I pursued an advanced diploma in critical care nursing after my bachelor of science in nursing degree. That gave me the competency that was necessary to offer critical care services to all patients. As the assistant chief nurse, I am usually supposed to coordinate all the leadership and management aspects that the hospital has accorded me.
I was able to manage patients and even serve as a manager while I was in college. That gave me the interest to become a competent manager in the future and be able to embrace different leadership and managerial principles to showcase my leadership capability. Before being accorded the mandate to be the assistant chief nurse, I worked as a team leader in all my shifts and I was able to assign duties to all workers, order drugs, give reports to the senior assistant chief nurse, and even make sure that patients were prepared well for theatre and those who needed blood transfusion have been sorted out.
General Hospital is one of the biggest hospitals in my country and it is usually open 24 hours every day. It has a bed capacity of 750 and was founded in 1956. The hospital has got an emergency department that is next to the critical care unit and both departments work closely. At the critical care unit, we have the most competent workers and we have been able to secure different trophies for maintaining competence all through. The team is usually committed to achieving better outcomes for patients and there are usually enough nurses for the patients admitted. 2-3 nurses may work on a single patient in ICU for the whole day, in different shifts. Despite the fact that the ICU is usually busy, there have been lesser discipline cases or complaints since the nurses are contented with the leaders that they have and the duties assigned to them are done in unison. Nurses do not report work burnout since the duty of Rota favors every individual.
The critical care unit usually has good team working since the patients are many and need nurses to work as a team to achieve better outcomes. Nurses have always shown competency all through and report everything on time. There has been a good culture that has been created and every nurse is committed to protecting the culture of the department. Nurses are well organized and report to work on time and in case of inconveniences, one reports on time to the assistant chief nurse or the team leader. However, there are a few aspects of leadership that the nurses miss out on. The first one includes less guidance from subordinate nursing personnel such as students who are having their clinical placements (West et al. 2015). Most of the students usually have to learn on their own or be guided by the clinical instructor which creates a gap in knowledge and most students might not learn important aspects of managing patients especially if the clinical instructor is not around.