Quiet at Night?
You are the night shift charge nurse on a busy surgical unit in a large, urban teaching hospital. Surgeries occur around the clock, and frequently, noise levels are higher than desired because of the significant number of nurses, physicians, residents, interns, and other health-care workers who gather at the nurses station or in the halls outside of patient rooms. Today, the unit manager has come to you because the hospital’s score on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (hCahPS) survey for the category Always Quiet at Night falls far below the desired benchmark. She has asked you to devise a plan to address this quality of care issue. The management goal in this situation is to achieve an HCAHPS score on Always Quiet at Night that meets the accepted best practices benchmark, thus assuring that patients get the rest they need to promote their recovery. The leadership goal is to foster a shared commitment among all health-care professionals working on the unit to achieve the Always Quiet at Night goal.

Assignment:

1. Identify five management strategies you might use to address the problem of excessive noise on the unit at night. For example, your list might include structural environmental changes or work redesign.
2. Then identify five leadership strategies you might use to promote buy-in of the Quiet at Night initiative by all health-care professionals on the unit. How will you inspire these individuals to work with you in achieving this critically important goal? What incentives might you use to reward behavior conducive to meeting this goal?
3. Discuss whether you feel this goal could be achieved by employing only the management strategies you identified. Could it be achieved only with the implementation of leadership strategies for team building