Using metaphor to clarify emerging roles in patient care management teams

Difficult economic times, competition for scarce resources and changing organizational paradigms are driving health care institutions to re-examine the ways in which they provide care. They must continually strive to provide excellent patient care and ensure positive patient outcomes while responding to increasing fiscal constraint. At Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, consistent with current trends, nurse managers are asked to take on broad spans of responsibility. The need to decentralize much of the decision making, problem identification and problem solving functions to the multidisciplinary team is a reality of those changes. This paper describes a process the dialysis staff undertook to better understand new organizational imperatives using an orchestra metaphor as a suggestive tool to help people clarify new roles and relationships in organizations that are evolving from a hierarchical model to a knowledge-based team approach to work. The intervention was successful for some people and not others. An analysis of the outcomes is provided from the nurse manager's perspective.