Pre-Disciplinary Checklist for Nurse Managers
Published: 03 July 2017
Published: 03 July 2017
One of the hardest jobs a manager has to do is discipline a worker for poor performance.
This is especially difficult if the erring nurse is ‘quite a nice person, really’, and you believe you have tried your hardest to remedy areas of concern. But the crunch has come and it all boils down to two main things:
Firstly, the nurse has a contract of employment that states what they must do to earn their wage, and secondly, one of your tasks as a manager is to manage poor performance.
So, I believe the following question-checks have the purpose of ensuring you have done everything possible to ensure the nurse has been afforded every opportunity to grow and improve.
By answering as many of the above questions in the positive, you have ensured that the staff member (and all staff for that matter) has indeed had good opportunities to grow and develop in your facility/ward/unit.
This has been written from experience (not necessarily mine) and there is one final comment that needs to be made.
In any disciplinary investigation, the leader/manager is often seen as the one with the power, and the erring staff member as the vulnerable party, so don’t let yourself be seen as abusing that power.