| Healthcare management is an industry where skill sets are incremental, and Registered Nurses (RNs) must gain their clinical skills before they develop their management skills. Professional training for management-bound RNs seldom comprises more than a few disjointed days or weeklong development seminars, which is valuable but inadequate. The purpose of this original basic qualitative study, which employed Husserl and Heidegger's approach of phenomenology, was to explore the lived experiences of staff RNs who transitioned into the Clinical Nursing Supervisor (Nurse Manager) role within a small rural community hospital in North Carolina. Semi-structured interviews using open-ended questions were utilized to collect rich, contextual data until data saturation occurred. Open and axial coding of the data, documented in a code/theme frequency table, facilitated the discovery of central themes within the data including: a lack of orientation to the new role; inconsistent expectations of the new role; the benefits of a formal program or structured orientation for the new role, and a need to focus the hospital administration on formal leadership orientation and succession planning. The evidence from this original basic qualitative study aligns with the published literature regarding the transition from a staff RN role into a nursing leadership role and supports making a proposal to the hospital's administration for a systems-oriented Clinical Nursing Supervisor training opportunity such as a 90-day nursing leadership orientation that included formal classes on budgeting, common human resource management issues, and how to evaluate staff. This formalized training, in concert with one-on-one mentoring with experienced Clinical Nursing Supervisors, would ensure a smoother transition from the staff RN role into a Clinical Nursing Supervisor role and would produce more efficient, more satisfied nursing leadership professionals who are more inclined to stay with the organization that helped their career growth. |
