How to be a charge nurse may not be part of your nursing school curriculum, but it will likely become part of your nursing career, particularly if you are working in a hospital. Generally, it’s a position that appeals to only a few nurses because it comes with a tremendous amount of responsibility, both clinical and logistical.
The charge nurse can be described as the sieve through which all information and people must pass on a given unit. The role may have mild variations depending on the type of unit, but ultimately, the charge nurse oversees the nursing staff, patient bed assignments, and almost anything that affects those two factors. The nurse in charge is the first tier in the “bumping up” process, whether it be a staff grievance, patient complaint, near miss, or sentinel event.
Needless to say, one of the prerequisites is relatively thick skin. However, if you are the sensitive type, acting as charge nurse need not be faced with dread; it can either be the bane of your existence or perhaps simply a valuable exercise in character development.
When a patient is scheduled for admission to the unit, whether immediately or with just several hours’ notice, the charge nurse finds and assigns the patient a bed and a nurse. The process is hardly ever simple. If the unit is full, the charge nurse must find a way to either justify another patient’s discharge or to fight the incoming patient’s admission. One rarely finds a consensus among stakeholders in this situation: the receiving unit of your discharged patient may push back, the incoming patient’s team may hurry you, the staff nurses may argue for changes to their assignment, and the patient’s physicians or families will have their own agenda. Depending on where you work, this may all be happening while you manage your own patient load.
There is good news. The key to success for any charge nurse is awareness, namely awareness of resources. It is absolutely essential that every charge nurse knows the boundaries of his or her scope. That will likely be institution-specific and thus easily accessible. For example, if you are a charge nurse in the OR and two surgeons try to book emergency cases at the same time, it behooves you to know who makes the call of who goes first. (Hint, it’s probably not you.)
Navigating your work within the confines of the boundaries established by your employer will arm you with the tools necessary to find the sweet spot between authority and your peers as a charge nurse. And no matter how pressured the work may feel, you must always take time for a deep breath.
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