Clinical Nurse Manager

If you watch a lot of CNBC or read a lot of Forbes, you know it’s not uncommon for executives to speak about businesses like Doctors speak about patients: The bottom line is “healthy,” for instance, the market is “ailing” and investors are “inflamed.”

For a Clinical Nurse Manager, the relationship between enterprise and medicine isn’t a metaphor. It’s reality.

That’s because the job of a Clinical Nurse Manager isn’t just taking care of patients; it’s taking care of business. As a Nurse, your fundamental responsibility is assisting Doctors with patient care by asking about symptoms, checking vital signs, administering medications, dressing wounds, keeping records and doing other tasks that support Doctors in diagnosing, treating and counseling patients. As a Clinical Nurse Manager, meanwhile, your fundamental responsibility is assisting executives by supervising staff, creating schedules, developing budgets and enforcing rules.

Because you’re at once a Nurse and a Manager, your job as a Clinical Nurse Manager is assuming both roles in order to fulfill your obligations to your patients as well as your employer. Your duties, therefore, include collaborating with Doctors to create and implement treatment plans for patients; conducting daily rounds to monitor the quality of patient care, as well as patient satisfaction; hiring, firing and promoting Nurses, as well as managing and supervising them; ordering medical supplies; developing and managing budgets for your unit; scheduling Nurses’ shifts; and ensuring Nurse compliance with rules and regulations.

Simply put: Your job is to make sure your nursing department is as healthy — financially and procedurally — as your patients are.