Nursing Tips - How to Organize and Prioritize Your Shift By Brent McNutt At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

To successfully and efficiently complete your daily tasks in your nursing shift, it is essential to organize and prioritize every time. The first thing that you have to understand is that things do not always go as planned. Rather, it is the exception when everything falls right into schedule. Because you are always expecting the unexpected, it will be easier for you to readjust your plans and not panic and get stressed out at the slightest changes. You will feel cooler and lighter in your discount landau scrubs. You should always have a Plan B even if it is just a vague plan.

Organizational and time management skills are invaluable skills for nurses and yet there are a lot of nursing schools that do not include these essential tools in their required courses, and only offer it as extension courses. Below are some ways to develop good organizational and time management skills.

Preparing at home

Being in the comfort of your home and away from the high intensity of your work environment, you will be able to think more clearly and objectively. While at home, you should already start organizing the basics of your shift. What you can do is try to map out a day in your life as a nurse. In a paper or word processor divide your shift into two hour increments and fill up the projected patient meal times, AM care, HS care, and so on. Include medication schedules such as ac, pc, and hs medications if there are any. Also put in when your patients are likely to go for therapy or tests and when MDs make their rounds. Also consider when new admits and discharges are likely to surge during the shift and what part of visiting hours gives you some time to catch up on tasks you left behind. The goal is to know when you will be busiest and when the tasks slow down so that you know how to readjust in any situation or circumstance.

Organizing at work

It is best to arrive early for your shift so that you have the time to assess the intensity of the previous shift and prepare yourself accordingly, whether for chaos or for downtime. So that you can anticipate what will ensue more or less in your shift, listen during rounds and reports on how busy the staff is going to be, the general level of acuity of that day's patients, who might have time to help you should you get overwhelmed, patients who require more of your time, what assessments, treatments and procedures you could learn from if you had the time, new patients and their diagnosis and treatments that you need to look into, time specific events such as meetings, things that you want to put off until the end of the shift or hope you don't need to do, and things that can be delegated to an LPN or nursing aide. Prioritize things that are difficult or you dislike so that you can get them out of the way. The more you put them off, the more they will be a burden for you for the rest of the day. Once you're done with the hard tasks, things will be generally lighter from there.

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