What the nurse looks for in the administrator.

Abstract

First and of foremost importance, the nurse looks for a competent physician in the administrator. In recent years there appears to be a growing tendency to appoint business men as hospital administrators. No one doubts that hospitals need to have good business policies. That much of the time and energy of the superintendent is frequently taken up with budgets, contracts, and like matter is to be deplored, but to place a business executive in charge all too often leads to an overshadowing of the philosophy of medicine, the high humanitarianism synonymous with medicine through the ages, while the patient becomes an object seen through the dollar sign. This has grave implications for the nurse and nursing. The following serves to illustrate this problem. The Director of Nurses of one of our well-known institutions operating a medical school and a school of nursing recruited a large class of nurse applicants, specifying among other things that there would be a small stipend paid to each student as had been customary. In the meantime the lay administrator learned that many schools do not pay a stipend and, without the knowledge of the Director of the School of Nursing, published that he was making a saving to the hospital by eliminating all student stipends. In so doing he eliminated the incoming class. It is the writer’s belief that a class could have been recruited without the stipend, but such business methods destroy confidence. One cannot campaign under one banner and operate under another. This brings our discussion to the plan of operation and the place of nursing therein. Nurses have long striven to meet the needs of the physician, and that they are not always able to do so is not infrequently because they do not know what those needs are in the administrator’s view. Therefore, it is proposed that the most effective procedure is first to have a plan of action, based upon sound phil-