Throughout the pandemic surges that ravaged our healthcare system, we at The DAISY Foundation stood in awe of nurses’ commitment to extraordinary care. Their courage, their dedication to their teams, their innovative solutions to caring for such sick patients, and their compassion to patients and families were truly breathtaking.
The DAISY Award nominations we read were powerful statements of what was going on at the point of care. Visitors may have been blocked from hospitals, but nurses’ impact was on display as never before.
Throughout the pandemic, we wondered how nurse leaders were faring. When the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) started their COVID-19 Longitudinal Nurse Leader Impact Study, looking at the toll the pandemic was taking on leaders, we hoped for the best and expected the worst. Over the course of the survey study conducted from July 2020 to August 2021, the findings revealed a shift from an urgent need for leaders to provide material support for their teams to the need to provide emotional support for their teams and for themselves.
Of course, the data revealed a plethora of severe staffing issues but it also shined a light on the emotional health and well-being of leaders — burn-out, low morale, resignations, and so on. Very troubling to us was the data regarding nurse managers, the role we often hear is the toughest in the building.
More than one-third of them stated they did not feel emotionally healthy or very emotionally healthy. When asked about which of the advancements that had taken hold during the pandemic they wanted to see continue, wider recognition of nurses’ contributions was the second most popular choice, only slightly behind the adoption of new staffing models.
The nurse manager position is too critical to the success of every healthcare organization to not take seriously the data AONL’s research revealed. It was apparent to AONL that the role of nurse manager needed a hard look structurally — its scope and work requirements. And it was apparent to us at the DAISY Foundation that we needed a call to action for nurse manager recognition.
Years ago, we had created The DAISY Nurse Leader Award. We had met too many managers and other leaders who told us they love being able to honor the nurses on their teams with DAISY awards, but as managers, they were not eligible to receive The DAISY Award because they did not provide direct patient care. Knowing that leaders are responsible for the environment in which clinicians can be their compassionate best, it felt true to our mission to create an application of The DAISY Award for nurse leaders.
While we made it readily available to our community of participating healthcare organizations, to be frank, prior to the pandemic, The DAISY Nurse Leader Award was not broadly adopted. It seemed the need for it just was not evident. Then the pandemic happened and with it the AONL study on its impact on leaders.
On February 14, 2022, in partnership with …read more
Read full article here: nurse.com
