Day in the life of
Director of Nursing – Massiel Heffner
My name is Massiel Heffner and I work as the Director of Nursing for a Community Health Center in NYC called Callen-Lorde. I’m a Registered Nurse with 6 years of experience in management and as a Triage nurse. I have also worked in-home care as a visiting nurse for Visiting Nurse Services of NY (VNSNY), and have also volunteered for NYU Langone in their post-anesthesia care unit.
Most people believe that being an RN is all about direct patient care. In my position as DON, I hardly ever work with patients. My day consists of sitting behind a desk attending virtual meetings, working on policies and procedures, completing reports, and answering emails. Other days, I can be found working on the clinical floor doing competency assessments and working on quality improvement projects. This latter is about assessing our existing processes and devising better ways of doing things to increase compliance, efficiency, and the delivery of better patient care.
My typical day
I start work at 8:00am. As soon as I clock in, I lead a morning huddle with my team -those I supervise. This is basically our morning check-in to go over any updates and reminders that they should know before the start of the work day. After this, I attend another morning huddle with my administrative staff. This one is also so we can all be on the same page about daily updates since we oversee a department of over 70 nurses across 4 different clinical sites.
After these 2 morning check-ins are completed, I work on the different projects I directly oversee. I co-lead a “Leadership Program” which provides ongoing training and support for our administrative staff. I also developed and oversee a “Preceptorship Program” which also provides training, ongoing support, and a structured learning curriculum for our new hires. Managing these two programs requires that I spend some time developing new curriculums and compiling new learning materials to serve as resources to sustain their successful completion.
I also spend some time working on time and attendance and performance improvement. This may include things like reviewing incident reports and developing corrective action plans, delivering feedback, and writing disciplinary actions when needed.
I usually help to provide lunch coverage on the clinical floor which is a nice change of pace. Eventhough, I do rounds to check on my team throughout the day, and sometimes I’m also scheduled to work with patients, the majority of my time is spent at a desk. My day is typically filled with meetings about new projects, staffing needs, quality improvement initiatives, interdepartmental updates, and data analysis which helps build the foundation for most of the decisions that are then made by the organization at large. Such decisions affect not just patient care but staff satisfaction as well, this is why my active involvement in these meetings is so important.
I’m also heavily involved in the recruiting, interviewing, selection, and retention of new employees. This includes things like writing and updating job descriptions, and the assessment of staffing needs and advocacy around recruitment and staffing ratios. I’m an active participant in our interviewing process as well. In fact, on any typical day, I may have 1-2 interviews scheduled at some point during the day.
On a good day, I leave work at 4pm. Eventhough, I never finish doing everything that is typically on my to-do list, I learned that this is the true nature of my job. In this position, I’ve learned to prioritize and delegate to the best of my ability. It’s a position that challenges me every day to learn something new and to want to do better…not just for the staff members that I supervise and rely on my leadership, but also for our patients. My never-ending passion to provide an outstanding level of care is what helps me wake up the next day to do it all over again.
Pros
There are a lot of things I love about my job. I love that most of my tasks and the things I do on a daily basis are self-paced. Although I report to a lot of people, I don’t have anyone pressuring me to get things done or “breathing down my neck”. My job is very independent which is how I normally thrive. I’m a people person so I also love the fact that a big component of my job is about building relationships. I love talking to my staff and showing a genuine interest in the things they do, who they are, and the things they care about. Even though I hardly ever have direct patient contact, I love that my job has such a great impact on the lives of all our patients in the form of the policies and procedures and quality improvement metrics I implement.
Cons
One of the major disadvantages of my job is that sometimes I’m forced to implement things I don’t necessarily agree with. Eventhough I’m not shy and I always speak up when I’m not in agreement with things, there are certain decisions that are completely outside of our control. In those situations, the best I can do is to explain the rationale as to why we have to do certain things in my attempt to maintain full transparency with my team.
