After a wonderful 4 days, learning about Patient Safety through the Telluride Experience, I now have a chance to sit down and reflect. I really enjoyed our prereading by John J. Nance, Why Hospitals should Fly. The most profound passage in this book still sticks with me…
” Nurses are in crisis, and with a low professional self-esteem and a national paradigm of discounted worth, inadequate staffing and senior nursing leaders typically far too disconnected and powerless to change things, nurses act like rats in an overcrowded cage and turn on one another” (P. 39). (Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility: Why Nurses Eat Their Young and Each Other).
As a DNP-HSL Student, this book and this experience was exactly what I needed to be a better leader. On Saturday, I started to think about a few things said by one of the faculty members. “You can not fire problems out of your system” and “We can not discipline errors out of people”… So, to bring this full circle I have learned three very important things:
1. Be the movement to create a metanoia in others, bringing collaboration, empathy, and respect to the forefront.
2. Be a visible leader. Be present.
3. Do not punish your co-workers when you are both victims of a faulty system and do not punish your employees after being set up for failure.