Kontakt 2013, 15(3):229-244 | DOI: 10.32725/kont.2013.028

Managing strategies of sistersNursing

Eva Marková^1,*, Sylva Bártlová²

¹ Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 1. lékařská fakulta, Ústav teorie a praxe ošetřovatelství

² Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Zdravotně sociální fakulta, katedra ošetřovatelství a porodní asistence

The authors of this contribution are dealing with the managing strategies of sisters working as nursing officers. The aim of the qualitative study is an analysis of the professional career and the managing position of a nursing officer and the variation in conditions of a health-care facility with regard to family background. It is also to understand the values and attitudes of sisters, to understand how their career advancement developed, to define the style of management of the nursing team, to map how professional and personal careers of the sisters interact, and especially, how this subjective reflection of the sisters and relations contribute to creation of long term working strategy. To analyse the professional career on of the sisters we used the classical qualitative method of embedded theory. This method allowed, within a qualitative analysis, the integration of the data acquired thanks to the interviewing technique with the nursing officers in university hospitals. The selection of the respondents was carried out combining two methods: intentional choice by means of the institution, snowball and specific choice. On the basis of the data analysis we created a model of professional paradigm. According to the first model a sister goes through several phases of professional career that we have called strategies of choosing profession, circle (changing nursing professions and workplaces), virtue of necessity (a situation when a nurse bringing up a child opts for a workplace with a regime that permits taking care for the child), and embedding in a nursing profession. According to the second model the embedding happens right after finishing the qualification education. The managerial career devolves on embedding in the profession. A nurse becomes a shift chief or a deputy matron, a matron and finally a nursing officer. In the lives on nursing officers we discovered factors which predispose them to a managerial position. At this position nursing officers use a combination of managerial strategies: authoritative, democratic and consultative. The theoretical model of professional paradigm of nursing officers provides opportunities for other research in which we will be able to check out, to verify or to falsify some segments, e.g. the course of professional growth of nurses and their managerial styles.

Keywords: matron; nursing officer; nursing management

Received: January 25, 2013; Accepted: April 12, 2013; Published: September 27, 2013  Show citation