What is a head nurse?

The Head nurse is the healthcare specialist responsible for fulfilling both managerial and nursing jobs. A head nurse is normally a registered nurse in charge of all or specified nurses belonging to a specific hospital, treatment center, medical institute, or healthcare facility. Frequently, faculty nurses who can ascertain experience and a high mastery level are promoted to the more management-oriented position. A head nurse is certainly responsible for the overall care of the patient’s seeking treatment with an inpatient and outpatient medical facility. It is the crucial duty of the head nurse to ensure the comfort level of the patient and manage the team during any surgery or medical procedure. The head nurse certainly directs the whole nursing staff and assists as a central notch of communication between the doctors and the nurses and administration and other professionals in the healthcare sector. The head nurse can work in various healthcare facilities with huge enough faculty to need somebody to regulate and coordinate these employees. These facilities comprise clinics, nursing homes, hospitals, and other therapy centers.

What do the head nurses do?

The head nurses perform several duties and responsibilities throughout the faculty. Being nurses, they complete their typical day-to-day nursing duties for particular patients. The nurse’s responsibility also comprises management, leadership, and communication as a manager. Some of the vital daily duties of a head nurse are as follows:

• Encouraging with and coordinating patient care
• Allotting nurses and other healthcare resources wherever needed
• Organizing nurse’s statements regarding patients
• Giving patient paperwork to the doctor
• Coordinating with the patient expenses with the payments department or process payments by their own
• Contributing to the hiring of new nursing staff and training of the freshers
• Making plans for nursing staff
• Settling conflicts between the employees
• Clearing out the issues of the patients
• Developing reports for the management of the faculty
• Placing orders for supplies and equipment.

All the aspects mentioned above are the everyday responsibilities of the head nurse.

Valuable skills which are required for becoming a head nurse

To complete the various vital daily activities, the head nurse certainly needs a variety of abilities associated with interpersonal skills, managerial proficiency, and office administration. The most valuable and helpful skills for the head nurses comprise the following:

• Leadership quality: The head nurse certainly uses and requires strong leadership skills to ensure that the staff nurses perform their duties safely and correctly.
• Communication: A head nurse needs to communicate the individual patient needs, instruction of nursing, and other various medically important data efficiently and clearly.
•  Organizations: Coordinating the nursing staff, managing the patient health reports, and monitoring the patient treatment depends heavily on the head nurses’ organization skills.
• Consumer service: The head nurse frequently works with traders to place and confirm orders for the equipment and supplies. Also, though they do not look at patients as customers, customer service skills are very helpful while communicating with the patients, taking notice of their wants, and fulfilling their requests.
• Kindness and compassion: While working with patients, the head nurses had to deal with them with empathy and understanding to interpret the patient’s needs, which will certainly help them address the medical issues of the patients.
• Analytic skills: As the head nurses often diagnose the victims, analyzing tests and their results or studying the patient’s file can certainly help them understand the patient’s medical issue. Also, the analysis of the hospital records could help with the administrative duties.
• Dispute Resolution: As the administrator of the whole nursing staff, the head nurse must frequently settle any type of confrontation that staff may have with each other or with the patient to provide a good and positive environment in the hospital.
• Capacity to multitask: Medical faculties are often in fast-paced work environments with various duties to complete the task. As a supervisor, the head nurse takes all the responsibility for completing the tasks in further addition to the basic nursing tasks.
• Responsibility: As the head of the nursing faculty, most of the responsibility for patient care certainly goes to the head nurse. Employers anticipate that their nurses should welcome the responsibility and prioritize the safety and health of patients.

Head nurses accomplish similar functions as any other nurse. They are in an administrative position and are especially responsible for the complete sections of faculties and communication with senior doctors and management. A head nurse could work in various medical facilities like a treatment centers, nursing homes, and hospitals. Generally, they work in wider facilities where there is a need to coordinate the nursing staff.

The Head nurse is generally in charge of teams of divisions or nurses of Health Care faculty. The job description of a head nurse comprises being liable for the team’s overall performance, which means they have to monitor all the nurses working under them and assure that they are fulfilling all their task requirements. Ensuring that all patients for whom the head nurse is responsible have needs met and gain proper attention is also the responsibility of the head nurse. A nurse head is in charge of carrying out and organizing several types of administrative work. They have to properly arrange, compile and conserve all the observations on patients taken by the nursing crew. Frequently they have to give the appropriate paperwork to the doctor and share the data on the patient they are dealing with. A head nurse could also assist in billing the patients and processing the payment information. A head nurse can also be a charge nurse or a nurse administrator depending on where the duties are or where they work, which are comprised in the job definition. They have both clinical and supervisory responsibilities in the faculty they work with.

The position of the head nurse is in critical management in the nursing department. The head nurse provides high-quality patient care. The head nurse sets the standards and guidance of nursing practice on a nursing unit, and they also manage the faculty delivering the proper care. Some roles of the head nurse are similar to a typical nurse, and some extra duties are also there to the head nurse, for which they earn more emphasis on dependable situations. The three types of roles, resource allocator, entrepreneur, and leader, emerge as the most significant.