The nurse manager or the nurse leader can re-engineer healthcare and may take responsibility for changing current policies, practices, and procedures. A good example is a massive transformation many hospitals underwent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was necessary to create new procedures for observing safety and avoiding infection to resolve the situation. According to Popejoy et al. (2020), “designed to improve hospital discharges, the Reengineered Discharge program (RED) prepares hospitalized patients for discharge back to their homes” (p. 158). Therefore, all internal logistics for implementing these procedures became the nurse leaders’ and managers’ responsibility.
Another example of nursing managers performing reengineering is when implementing new strategic vaccination programs for the population. According to Bloom et al. (2017), “vaccines are now widely regarded as an effective and cheap tool for improving health” (p. 214). To implement the government’s vaccination requirements, it was necessary to fully establish a new workflow where nurses could vaccinate all wishing patients. Sometimes the vaccinations took place outside the territory of hospitals, which somewhat complicated the task. Therefore, it can be said with confidence that nursing managers and leaders perform essential healthcare reengineering functions.
References
Bloom, D. E., Canning, D., & Weston, M. (2017). The value of vaccination. In Fighting the Diseases of Poverty. Routledge. pp. 214-238.
Popejoy, L. L., Wakefield, B. J., Vogelsmeier, A. A., Galambos, C. M., Lewis, A. M., Huneke, D., & Mehr, D. R. (2020). Reengineering skilled nursing facility discharge: Analysis of RED implementation. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 35(2), 158. DOI: 10.1097/NCQ.0000000000000413