How An MBA Has Supported My Role As A Nurse Leader.
It has been a few years now since I finished my MBA program, and I will admit, there have been times when I regret choosing to get an MBA, but I do think that it has served me well and will continue to do so. For any of those who have not read my previous blog where I discussed my decision between MBA, NP, CRNA, and MSN, you can read that HERE. Anyway, at that time I decided to pursue an MBA with a specialization in Healthcare Administration. When I started the program, I was a nurse working in the Operating Room and did not have many leadership responsibilities outside of training the new nurses and surgical technologists.
Many of the skills you learn during business school: economics, accounting, and financial management, were not skills I was obviously using as a nurse in a clinical setting. However, I did eventually move into a leadership role where I am the manager over surgical services, overseeing the operating room and sterile processing department. You can read about my transition from clinical to management HERE.
I will say initially I did not think that an MBA program was going to be useful to me as a circulator and frankly, I didn’t think that an MBA was needed to be a leader in the operating room, at least at a manager level. Looking back, I think that was a very closed-minded viewpoint.
Many of the tasks that are performed in a manager or director role, depending on how your hospital is organized, are based around the financial aspects of running a department. Capital planning was a role that I took on and I will say that both my finance and accounting classes helped me tremendously in both making decisions and communicating with other departments. For example, if I am looking at purchasing a new piece of equipment that cost several thousand or tens of thousands of dollars, it allowed me to easily work with the finance team, understanding the language, and how to use data to support the need for this equipment. Sometimes that is by showing the incremental volume that this equipment would support, which would help cover the cost of the equipment overtime, but also be an additional stream of revenue for the hospital. Other times, it’s showing the reduced labor costs or the potential loss of revenue not purchasing or upgrading equipment.
Other areas that my MBA helped me were in data analysis and optimization. If you ever get the chance to take an Excel class, make sure you pay attention- seriously this is a skill that I use daily in management both in analyzing data and planning. Understanding your way around Excel and even Power BI can be life changing. I have leaders from other units coming for me to help them with data on a regular basis, I show them how to pull it from an explorer but then also how to export it and present it. Anyway, when you’re a nurse or surg tech in a clinical setting you are not thinking as much about optimizing the schedule. You know all those metric goals you probably hear management talk about- turnover time, first case on time starts (FCOTS), you likely do not hear much about the many others that are likely (or should be) monitored. Other metrics include- room utilization, block utilization, volume by minutes and number of procedures. Being able to analyze your data can help you optimize your department and increase the gross revenue. You can also make sure that you are reducing your costs through efficiency.
While you may not be concerned about revenue and be thinking “Why should I care about how much money the hospital makes?” Well, I can tell you from my experience that when we optimize our performance, increase our revenue, and decrease our cost- you know, that whole optimization thing. That is when we get approval to add more equipment like additional da Vinci robots, new imaging equipment, or add additional FTE. All of this equates to benefits for both employees and the patients.
I can tell you from my experience that having the knowledge from business school also allowed me to communicate interdepartmentally very well. Being able to speak the lingo of accounting and finance allowed me to communicate with senior leadership on why we would need new equipment or other resources. You need to be able to explain how the capital expenditure of a million dollar da Vinci will add revenue to the department or how not purchasing a new sterilizer is going to cause down time and negatively impact the metrics that have been set. Remember, not everyone who makes decisions in the hospital setting is either clinical or has experience in the operating room. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you can bridge that gap by educating yourself a little bit it will help tremendously.
Another aspect that my MBA program helped me with was leadership. Being a manager of the operating room and sterile processing gave me a lot of responsibility. Not only in reporting out my department’s results but also dealing with recruiting, discipline, and strategic planning. Usually these are topics that you do not deal with as a nurse and therefore are a ‘new’ concept. Strategic planning has been the most significant ‘need’ for the department. We are in a state of growth and need to properly plan for that growth. For example, there are plans to extend ‘normal operating hours’ to later in the evening to accommodate add on procedures for surgeons who are in clinic until the afternoon. But in order to accurately prepare for that, we need to determine how many FTE, both nurses and surgical techs, we need throughout the day based on the predicted volumes. We also need to work with anesthesia leadership to ensure that we can all be on the same page.
I truly believe that everything that I learned in the MBA program was well worth it. There were some things that I probably won’t utilize, but overall, it has helped me live in that world between the frontline and the executive leaders. I’m able to understand both sides of goals and decisions that are made for our department and I can explain the ‘why’ much easier because of this. After completion of my MBA, I also took a strategic leadership course through the hospital’s education program, which I think even further discussed and explained a lot of what I learned during my MBA classes. However, I think that will be enough ‘business’ courses for the rest of my career. Clinical education is a much easier concept for me to grasp than business topics, which I will discuss at a later time. If you’re considering getting an MBA as a nurse, I hope this was helpful!
