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A perennially challenging role.

I’ve always found the role of nurse manager to be the most difficult one in health care. Crushed between staff nurses begging for enough resources to do the job and administrators pressing for cost containment, nurse managers often find it hard to make any progress at all.

This job comes with 24-hour responsibility, often (incredibly) for more than one unit. This can mean taking responsibility for, say, 50 patients, and 80 or more staff. Just managing payroll for so many people (as many managers still have to do) can take half the pay period! And all this for the princely salary of . . . less than what many of their senior staff nurses are making.

Redesigning the nurse manager role includes greater role flexibility.

Those of us who’ve been in nursing for decades simply accepted that, if you wanted to move up the nursing career ladder, you would have to accept all of the above. Younger generations of nurses, though, see things differently.

In this month’s Viewpoint, “Adapting the Nurse Manager Role to Attract Generation X and Millennial Nurses,” nurse manager Muriel Moyo has some practical suggestions for redesigning this essential role to support and develop a new generation of nurse leaders. They include, for example, ways to allow nurse managers greater role flexibility for the sake of work-life balance.

A coming wave of retirements.

We have been told that in coming years we’ll face a wave of nurse (and nurse manager) retirements. If health care administrators were to pay attention to these ideas (which are based on the American Organization of Nurse Executives Guiding Principles for Nurses Leaders), they would find it to be a good investment in the productivity (and health) of a new cadre of nurse managers.