As a nurse, you are an essential pillar of a healthcare system that significantly depends on your dedication and talents. Your education, skills, and willingness to work in a stressful environment all combine to produce the exemplary service that you provide.
Nurses have to work with a positive attitude in delivering efficient care, managing their schedule, and still finding time to upskill their career.
More importantly, however, you should find time to take care of yourself. Stress causes over a million workers to skip work and stay home annually, and nurses are not immune to stress, in fact, owing to their nature of work, they’re more susceptible to it.
Incorporating these characteristics into your nursing profession is a tall order to ask, but given your willingness to learn, the tips mentioned below will help you become a nurse practitioner to be reckoned with.
The following are some productivity tips for nurses who are overwhelmed by the frantic nature of their work:
Jump to:
1. Upskill with an Online Degree
Advancing your career through upskilling is a natural part of progression in any career, and nursing can be no different. On average, nurse practitioners can earn up to a third more than their current incomes if they have a higher education degree.
With the lure of better hours, work flexibility, and more decision-making responsibility, why wouldn’t you pursue a higher degree? When you upskill, you can be more selective with your responsibilities, which will improve your quality of care.
However, going back to university and attending classes after your shift at the hospital ends cannot be the only way for upskilling. There are tons of universities offering advanced online degrees in FNP nursing and some, like The UTA FNP master's program which meets IOM Recommendations, are vetted to be some of the best programs.
With an online degree, you can do your coursework while enjoying a balanced academic and work life. Once you get qualified under the supervision of a physician, you're ready to showcase your knowledge.
2. Get Rid of Distractions
While working, you may feel tempted to reach into your pocket and pull out your phone. You should avoid doing that at all costs. Your workspace needs your complete attention, and distractions may lower your productivity by up to 40%.
Therefore, you need to make sure you remove them. Put your cellphone away for the duration of your work hours and use it only when your shift has ended.
While working, avoid engaging in idle conversation with your coworkers and stick to work-related questions only. Sometimes a patient's relative might need more assistance and even assurances, so make sure you are thorough in your responses and in assuaging their concerns with reassurances.
If you are unavailable, or unable to assist, refer them to someone who is, which could be a doctor or someone in the staff familiar with the patient’s history.
3. Don't Attempt Multitasking
You may think multitasking is the best way to stay on top of your work, but it can hinder your progress. Not everyone can multitask effectively, and there are less than 3% of people that are able to successfully handle numerous tasks simultaneously.
The hospital is also not a suitable place to juggle different responsibilities at one time. So, it’s better not to exercise multitasking skills there.
While working with patients, you need to pay attention and actively listen to what they're saying. Not paying attention to the patient’s condition or to what they’re saying may lead you to miss out on crucial details pertaining to their medical history, allergies, and even sensitive body conditions.
In some instances, you may end up prescribing the wrong medicine, mix up electronic health charts and forget to conduct necessary assessments, all of which can lead to tragic consequences.
4. Show Up to Work Early
Making sure you are there at work before everyone else has shown up is a great way to start the day. When you reach work ahead of shift, you’ve time to prepare yourself for the rigors of the day.
You get to stock up on your inventory with pens, alcohol swabs and even check if your work computer is logged in and connected; tiny details that can cost a lot of time when you are in the heat of the shift. Having taken care of all that beforehand means that you can be ready to greet patients with the right mindset and preparation.
Once you clock in, a lot of your time will be taken up by looking after patients and you won’t have time to take breaks in between. Ensuring that you’re ready to take on the challenges of the day when you arrive at work early leads to greater resilience throughout the day.
5. Give Yourself a Break
Nurses are no strangers to burning out, with over 80% experiencing fatigue and extreme exhaustion over the course of their professional lives. While you may be good at completing work on time, don't overexert yourself.
You need to take breaks and rest a while, even if you have to do it for a few minutes. This helps overused muscles to relax and enables you to calm your heart rate down and become more relaxed.
Sometimes, you may also start panicking or mishandling your work when you're tired and out of focus. So, sneaking in a few minutes to calm down your nerves can help you find your bearings and bounce back in face of challenging situations with a calmer mind.
You may also look into handholding and squeezing a stress ball, try deep breathing exercises to help ground yourself, or light stretching during bathroom breaks.
6. Be On Top of Patient Needs
Your patients need your time and attention when they come for a checkup. Failure to meet patients’ needs may put them off. Therefore, when a patient arrives for a checkup, make sure you are tending to their needs right away and chart down their necessary details. Over 30% of patients leave hospitals without being checked due to long wait times, so make sure yours don't.
When you get critical-care patients, ensure you hit the correct code and wheel them into an emergency room. Delaying treatment may cause the patient’s health to deteriorate with serious repercussions. While you are on rounds, make sure you have the patient's charts and run all the necessary tests in one go, so you don't inconvenience them further.
Also, let your patients express their expectations to you. This ensures that they receive a patient-centered care that facilitates their needs and preferences.
7. Delegate Tasks Properly
As a nurse, you may work in a team or get an assistant appointed to you if you're a senior-level practitioner. Having a team enables you to divide the workload and deliver quality care. Delegating tasks is all about assigning responsibilities based on gauging skill and talent. Think of it as compartmentalizing your tasks.
You should assign tasks in advance, ensuring that they are suited to the individual’s needs and doesn’t put them in any undue stress. Having the ability to delegate tasks this way will earn you your team’s utmost respect and increase their job satisfaction.
Final Thoughts
The nursing sector is a busy one, which makes having productivity hacks up your sleeve that much more important. Productivity is all about utilizing time efficiently. The core skills you need to jack up productivity include upskilling, limiting distractions, and avoiding the lure of multitasking. Also, while increasing productivity, you should keep the patient front and center in your focus, meet their needs, answer their questions, and involve them in the medical treatment process. Further, if you are nurse manager, you should delegate tasks that align with each individual nurse’s qualification, skill, and talent, which will result in greater productivity enhancements for the whole staff.
