Problem Solving: Nurse Manager

With the ever evolving complexity of the health care system, the role of the nursing management’s ability to question, critically think and make rational decisions becomes even more important. According to Toygar & Akbulut (2013), “Healthcare managers, in particular, have to deal with a much larger number of and harder decision-making and problem-solving challenges that did not even exist a decade ago”. Almost all actions in the health care system related to patient care, require problem solving and decision making. It is imperative to have a free flow of ideas for problem solving as it helps prevent preconceived ideas from controlling the process. As the health care system involves team work, many decisions are made through group participation. When each decision maker optimizes with her data parameters and proposes the solutions to others, all group members generate different solutions in parallel. Hence, they search the solution space more thoroughly (Barkhi, R., 2001). It requires special skills to deal with situations that affect a group.

It is important to have an organized approach to problem solving; otherwise one may get stuck in a loop of solving the same problem over and over again without coming to a conclusion. According to Zarucki, M. (2013), there are many different tools to solve problems arising in organizations but the question of how to select an appropriate method remains.