Overview
The Emergency Department (ED) Nurse In-Charge (ED-NIC) is responsible for supporting, leading and directing nursing staff in the provision of high quality, patient centred care. The ED-NIC facilitates the flow of the department, and liaises with the various key stakeholders to ensure timely and safe patient care, aiming to maintain hospital standards and meet state-wide KPIs.
Essential role functions: facilitating the flow of patients safely throughout the various clinical areas in the department, the maintenance of a high standard of care in the Emergency Department, and ensuring the safety of staff, patients and carers. The NIC is also responsible for safely staffing the department, and coordinating with other health divisions to ensure high quality of health care is provided to the public with compassion and empathy.
Responsibilities
The SHED NUM, SHED Director and SH Access staff are responsible for ensuring that all staff working within the NIC role are aware of the roles and responsibilities.
Role Details
- Lead, support, motivate and direct staff in the provision of high quality, culturally safe health care.
- Supervise employees and act appropriately to manage any behaviour that does not meet policy and procedure, ensuring safe patient care.
- Coordinate and encourage flow throughout the department, between clinical areas within the ED, liaising with both medical and allied health staff, to ensure the safe and timely discharge of patients from the ED.
- Oversea the staffing of the department, ensuring an adequate skill mix for each shift, and recognising the need for psychiatric or behavioural specials to minimise risk to staff, patients and carers.
- Evaluate the quality of service provision through the comparison of patient outcomes against key performance indicators relevant to the Emergency Department.
- Demonstrate a sound understanding of emergency nursing.
- Facilitate and lead regular team huddles with key members of the ED team, and have a clear understanding of the emergency department escalation procedure.
- Ensure patients appropriately streamed into the relevant pods based on COVID-19 criteria.
- Attempt to diffuse conflict and employ conflict resolution skills when dealing with problems involving all levels of employees, patients and the public.
- Delegate employees rostered for each shift for the delivery of patient care on the basis of workload prioritisation and employees’ level of experience and skill.
- Maintain communication regarding patient departure delays on the bed requests, and liaise with access staff regarding barriers to timely ward transfers.
- Liaise with the Access Manager/ Bed Coordinator and/or After-Hours Coordinator, the Emergency Department NUM and Ambulance Victoria to communicate barriers to the provision of timely and safe patient care.
- Facilitate peer support, debriefing and counselling for employees when required.
- Report clinical and non-clinical incidents via VHIMs
- Assist with nursing care as required.
Supporting Documentation
Nil
