Table 3 The themes and their content
From: Managerial challenges faced by Swedish nurse managers in perioperative settings– a qualitative study
The themes | Main content |
|---|---|
Striving to treat employees with consideration and solicitude | - Calling nurse managers in their spare time, for example, in order to talk about personal matters or to get notification about vacation time - Contacting nurse managers during unsocial hours when a replacement was needed due to a sick colleague |
The obligation to take care of each employee’s individual needs | - Finding suitable work tasks to meet everyone’s needs in order to help them enjoy work, for example, for those getting close to retirement who cannot meet the physical challenges of the work - The documentation process, the process of working with the insurance company, and follow-up talks with employees who are on sick leave. |
To succeed in convincing others is an uphill battle | - Working with a group of employees who always opposed every decision that was made - Solving conflicts in different employee groups - Old matters can still pop up a long time after these issues were supposed to have been solved - Working with group dynamics when re-allocating employees between different operating departments |
Finding solutions to what seemed impossible | - Being overwhelmed with tasks that could sometimes be performed by people with other competencies, for example, organising lunch breaks, employee work schedules, while still working directly with patient care - Manual documentation because of substandard, non-user-friendly and complicated computer systems - Attending constant meetings |
Staff recruitment, allocation, and management | - The constant challenge of working with recruitment and replacing sick employees - Keeping up with surgical output demands having employees off sick – constant discussions with the surgeons who do not have the same picture - Recruiting employees with minimal financial means, and dealing with their disappointment - Having enough staff members, and not being constantly on the verge of an employee shortage. Receiving help from the human resources department about how to write a good advertisement, knowing where to advertise, and choosing proper candidates to recruit |
Working with constantly changing planning | - Shortcomings in surgeons’ planning of the operating programme - “Educating the surgeons” in order to minimise the discrepancy between anaesthesia and the surgeons - Allowing employees to adjust to new surgeries or organisational changes before implementing them - Moving or rebuilding operating rooms during ongoing operations, maintaining surgical output |