The Nursing Director is a Registered Nurse (RN) responsible for upholding excellence in the provision of nursing care through the implementation of the Professional Practice Model. The Nursing Director is responsible for operational, human resource, quality, and financial management of the assigned department. The Nursing Director utilizes professional practice as the foundation for leading nursing practice.

The Nursing Director collaborates with the interdisciplinary team to translate and implement organizational and divisional priorities into the department’s operations. The Nursing Director implements quality and safety initiatives, leads process improvement, and ensures adherence to hospital and clinical standards of performance. The Nursing Director ensures a patient care environment that supports a safe, knowledgeable, compassionate, productive, and engaged staff. The Nursing Director partners with the interdisciplinary care team to ensure the delivery of safe, quality patient care and compliance with administrative, regulatory, and clinical policies and procedures.

The Nursing Director’s decisions and actions are based on the ethical principles outlined by the American Nurses Association’s Code of Ethics for Nursing. The Nursing Director practices in adherence with the American Nurses Association’s (ANA) Nursing Administration: Scope and Standards of Practice for Nurse Administrators, the ANA Code of Ethics for Nursing, the Oregon State Board of Nursing’s Nurse Practice Act, and within the context of the Nurse Executive Competencies developed by the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE). The Nursing Director exemplifies the principles of the OHSU Culture of Safety Position Statement by committing to a Just Culture, a Reporting Culture, a Learning Culture, and an Engaged Informed Culture.

Strategic Planning:

• Partners with others to develop a department strategic plan that aligns with the division strategic plan and nursing’s vision.
• Collaboratively formulates department objectives, goals and specific strategies related to initiatives.
• Distributes leadership to achieve strategic targets.
• Develops short and long-term goals that identify the target conditions.
• Coordinates the implementation of interventions to meet department-level goals.
• Communicates, implements, and evaluates the unit strategic plan.

Operational Leadership

• Partners with others to enhance healthcare and, ultimately patient care through interdisciplinary activities, such as education, consultation, management, technological development, or research opportunities.
• Applies systems theory with an understanding that how parts of a system relate to the overall system.
• Maintains knowledge of current nursing practice and the roles and functions of care team members (e.g. charge nurse, code team, RRT)
• Evaluates staff’s competency and intervenes to optimize performance and ensure safe, quality, effective and efficient patient care.
• Leads and practices patient/family advocacy and promotes patient-centered decisions and outcomes.
• Maintains visibility and open communication with the staff and department leadership
• Communicates plans and decisions to department staff and other stakeholders.
• Asserts view in a non-judgmental manner.
• Ensures the care environment supports the provision of safe quality care, and a work place that promotes shared decision-making, accountability, autonomy and engagement.
• Reflects on own method of decision-making and the role of beliefs, values and inferences to develop leadership and performance capacity.
• Practices within shared-governance structures to distribute leadership and promote decision-making appropriate level within the governance structure
• Celebrates successes and accomplishments

Financial Management

• Evaluates nurse leaders’ achievement toward financial performance targets. Develops nurse leaders in managing productive, non-productive and premium pay to optimize performance goals.
• Achieves financial targets: Manages productive, non-productive and premium pay to optimize performance goals.
• Collaborates with the Professional Practice Leader to prioritize and allocate resources for department/division level education & practice priorities.
• Develops innovative solutions and applies strategies to obtain appropriate resources for nursing initiatives.
• Promotes activities that inform others about cost, risks, and benefits or care, or of the plan and solution.

Human Resources

• Uses evidence-based leadership to promote desired behaviors.
• Manages leader and staff performance through progressive development and actions to advance a culture that embraces a Learning Organization.
• Develops a high-functioning workforce in collaboration with the department leadership.
• Recognizes and rewards exemplary professional practice.
• Mentors and coaches staff in an ongoing and progressive manner.
• Monitors and evaluates the application of practice standards.
• Collaborates with department leadership to facilitate behaviors that impact safety, quality, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
• Leads department efforts to recruit & retain highly qualified staff.
• Develops department succession planning initiatives.
• Collaborates with the PPL (if applicable) to identify individual practice issues, develops improvement strategies, and evaluates performance for all nursing staff on assigned units.

Performance Improvement

• Develops the department/division quality plan in collaboration with the unit’s formal and informal leaders.
• Utilizes data to identify areas for improvement based on assessment and current states.
• Articulates the link between metrics and goals.
• Monitors and uses data to determine patient care quality improvement objectives.
• Evaluates the practice environment and designs and implements quality improvement strategies to ensure nursing sensitive outcomes meets or exceeds established goals.
• Evaluates the impact/benefits of organizational, nursing, and department initiatives.
• Identifies areas of risk and makes suggestions for reducing risk and improving outcomes.
• Trends and investigates concerns and errors to understand the root cause of occurrences of errors or adverse events and success.
• Maintains oversight for the department-level communication plan to connect system, healthcare and nursing initiatives.
• Supports workflow processes that builds a culture of safety.
• Uses current research findings and other evidence to expand clinical knowledge, enhance role performance, and increase knowledge of professional issues.

Professionalism

• Evaluates practice in relation to the professional practice standards and existing evidence.
• Promotes translation of theory, scope & standards into practice to exercise autonomy and decision-making authority.
• Advances practice excellence by communicating a clear and consistent message about the the ownership of role and standards -based professional practice.
• Mentors and supports others to access resources for their professional development
• Engages in informal and formal processes of giving and seeking feedback regarding role performance from individuals, professional collegues, representatives, administrators, and others.

• Master’s degree in nursing leadership.
• Experience in nursing management.
• Three years of management experience in the related clinical area of practice.
• Professional certification in nursing leadership-e.g. Nurse Executive/Administrator.