Nurses Station: Nurses to benefit from mentoring program

Successful labor-management brings good changes
Nurses to benefit from mentoring program

By DEBORAH A. MILES
Nurses who enter the psychiatric arena at the state Office of Mental Health (OMH) often find the demands of the job overwhelming.

To ease the transition of working in an OMH facility, a nurse mentoring program is on the drawing board, and is being called “Nurse2Nurse.”

It is designed to help nurses adjust to an OMH setting, and teach them the rewards of being part of this highly specialized care.

PEF VP Pat Baker

“Many nurses who have worked at OMH for years have a wealth of experience and knowledge,” said PEF Vice President Pat Baker. “Many of them will be retiring in the near future. So, we decided to tap into their expertise and develop a mentoring program to aid new OMH nurses.”

Baker was the driving force behind the program, according to Barbara Rock, PEF chair of the OMH labor-management nurses subcommittee and a nurse at Buffalo Psychiatric Center.

Barb Rock

“Psychiatric nursing is very different than acute-care nursing. One of the key roles of a psychiatric nurse is to help educate patients regarding their medications. Often, when they begin to feel better, they want to stop taking them. We have to teach individuals how to manage their illnesses, so they can live successfully in their communities. This can be very challenging,” Rock said.

“Psychiatric nurses also manage direct patient care and all medical needs for as many as 28 patients. They supervise staff members assigned to their areas and play a key role in crisis situations,” she said.

Specific to nurses
“In OMH and other state agencies, a lot of nursing issues were being decided by people who were not nurses,” Baker said. “PEF realized it was vital to get a nurses sub-committee going just to deal with nursing issues. As a result, we tackled the plan to comply with the Mandatory Overtime Law and are now working on the nurse mentoring program.”

The program has two phases. First, nurses at each of the 29 OMH facilities will be given a comprehensive needs survey. With this input, a curriculum for the mentoring program will be developed and launched later this year.

“Experts say mentoring is beneficial and essential in today’s working environments,” Baker said. “It combines an individual’s thirst for learning with a human connection. It’s an effective way for OMH to transfer knowledge to its employees and, ultimately, it is the consumer who will reap the benefits.”

Committee gets results
Rock, who is on the committee with Barbara Serafin, Gracie James, Kevin Connolly and Dorothy Kurta, said the development of the committee also proved to be a step in the right direction.

“One of our initial projects was to discuss implementation of the Mandatory Overtime Law in OMH facilities. We worked together to make plans on how facilities would meet the demands of the law,” Rock said.

“Creative scheduling showed managers how to reduce the amount of mandatory overtime. Many managers were pleasantly surprised at how easily we were able to achieve our goal. Their initial feeling was if we don’t have mandatory overtime, we can’t run this operation. We had to prove to them it could be done. You just must learn to do business differently.”

Baker said the success of the cooperative strategies to deal with mandatory overtime at the OMH labor-management table paved the way for the mentoring program.

“It’s all a matter of working together, listening to the individuals who have experience and insight into a particular area, and having the flexibility to go with change,” she said.