Many healthcare professionals are all too familiar with the phenomenon of becoming burned out. In the midst of the intense work environment and long hours, they often struggle to remember why they do what they do, and they become disconnected.
Rich Bluni, RN, LHRM
When Rich Bluni, RN, LHRM, kicks off this year’s OR Manager Conference, he will emphasize the importance of engagement, prompting OR professionals to reconnect with their passion for healthcare.
The conference, which takes place October 7-9 at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tennessee, features four tracks, including ambulatory surgery centers, new manager, OR business management, and a masters series, all of which will offer OR professionals a variety of tools and strategies to use in their own facilities.
Bluni, Studer Group coach and author of Oh No…Not More of that Fluffy Stuff!, will use humor and his 20 years of healthcare experience to remind OR leaders why the “fluffy stuff,” such as gratitude, is sometimes what is most important in driving engagement and providing quality care.
“It’s very easy to get so focused on the brain and start to slip away from the heart,” he told OR Manager. “A lot of times when people get burned out, they find that it has very little to do with their intellectual process or the ‘what’ or the ‘how,’ and it has everything to do with the ‘why.’”
Engagement starts with you, Bluni says, and with knowing your “why”—“Why are you here? Why are you in healthcare? What are you in the OR? Why do you do what you do?” he asks. And once these questions are answered, the results are evident. When people are engaged with their “why,” Bluni says, they:
• are happier
• are easier to teach
• care more
• are better team players
• get better and safer results.
Bluni’s fast-paced experiences as a flight nurse, in the ICU, as an ER manager, and in risk management used up a lot of his energy, and he found himself burned out and dreading his work.
“I sat back and reevaluated, and I became obsessed with trying to learn how to fall back in love with what I did,” he says. “I treated it like relationship counseling—my relationship with being a nurse, my relationship with healthcare—what did I need to do to rehabilitate that? I didn’t want to be a victim, so I decided to do something about it.”
This reexamination led to the practices that Bluni shares today with the organizations and professionals he consults.
“If somebody who’s a leader is feeling disengaged, then everybody that works with them or for them is going to feel disengaged,” he says.
“If you think about a marriage engagement, you’re making a commitment to be present with someone. So when you’re thinking about engagement in an OR setting, that’s probably one of the areas, if not one of the top areas, where you want people to be engaged.”
Effective leadership starts with the leaders themselves, Bluni says. “It sounds cliché, but people say you can’t love anybody unless you love yourself, and you can’t lead anybody if you’re not feeling like a leader,” he points out. “When you fly, they always tell you if the oxygen mask falls, you should first put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on somebody who might need help, and if you think about it, that’s counterintuitive to what people in healthcare do.”
Bluni will also explore the concept of being a “just a.” “People say, ‘I’m just a scrub,’ ‘I’m just a tech,’ ‘I’m just an aide,’ ‘I’m just a float nurse.’ And when people call themselves ‘just a’s,’ they minimize their importance,” he says. “In healthcare, certainly in the OR, there is no such thing as a ‘just a.’” ✥
For more information about the annual OR Manager Conference and to register, visit www.ormanagerconference.com.
