PRESESSION

Focusing on teamwork skills
for charge nurses

Leadership Conference 2013 presessions began Thursday, including "Charge Nurse: Putting the Team Back into Teamwork: Skills to Energize and Synergize Your ED Team." Attendees of this full-day presession earned 6.5 contact hours as they learned essential leadership, team-building and conflict management strategy skills.

Presenters Nancy Bonalumi, MSN, RN, CEN, FAEN, and Cindy Lefton, PhD, RN, led attendees through several skill-building exercises, including:

• Developing a personal mission statement
• Assessing your emotional intelligence and how it enhances your leadership practice
• Identifying how to create and sustain a healthy ED work environment
• Using conflict management strategies to improve team performance

Bonalumi said she hoped attendees left the session with "an increased knowledge of themselves, who they are, how they respond to situations, and how to use emotional intelligence as a mechanism for being a strong leader."

"We hope that they would be able to go back and use these skills and be effective team players as well as leaders," she said.

Lefton added that knowledge of strategies that nurse leaders can use to create and sustain healthy work environments "is critical not only to the well-being of the staff but to patient outcomes. There is evidence supporting both of those, and ENA endorses healthy work environments."

Amy Carpenter Aquino