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A team of community nurses was encouraged to adapt an electronic patient caseload tool by making sure they were all involved in its development and implementationIn this article...
Why nurses need to adapt to new ways of working
Approaches to implementing structured changes at work
Predicting how people will react to change
How to encourage people to embrace change in daily practice
Author
Ben Bowers is community charge nurse, Cambridgeshire Community Services Trust, and a Queen's Nurse.Abstract
Bowers B (2011) Managing change by empowering staff. Nursing Times; 107: 32/33, early online publication.
Nurses must constantly adapt to a variety of radical and incremental changes in the way they work, but their emotional responses can inhibit changes from being sustained in practice.
Implementing sustainable and meaningful change means supporting each individual to find value in new ways of working. This article shows how a team of community nurses were empowered to improve their practice by using an electronic caseload tool. This was done in a structured and supportive way by using Lewin's change management process, an approach that has benefits for supporting and sustaining changes in practice.
Keywords: Change process, Empowerment, Sustainable change
This article has been double-blind peer reviewed
Figures and tables can be seen in the attached print-friendly PDF file of the complete article
5 key points
Changes in practice always create emotional responses in employees
Planning change in an open, structured way aids communication and staff participation
Natural resistances to change must be addressed to be able to progress
Involving everyone in the process from the start enables resistances to be examined and constructively addressed
Change is only sustainable if everyone involved psychologically owns the new ways of working
Changes in the workplace naturally create uncertainty and can be emotionally challenging for employees. Change, particularly when it is unexpected, can undermine confidence and threaten sense of purpose (Holbeche, 2006).
The demands of healthcare mean nurses work in constantly changing environments; they must continually adapt to different demands, new technologies, government policies and other innovations.
Although commitment to new ways of working is crucial to delivering high- quality healthcare, nurses often say they feel change is imposed on them and that their views are not taken into consideration. This perception does little to...