نگرانی از اداره بخش یا حفاظت از خود: پارادوکس مدیریت بخش توسط سرپرستاران

Background and purpose: Nurse managers are responsible for creating and maintaining a professional work environment and their leadership styles are of great importance in reinforcing effective environment for promoting clinical competence. The purpose of this study was to explain the ward management concerns or self-protection as a paradox of ward management by head nurses. Materials and methods: In a qualitative research, 22 head nurses participated. Data was collected through unstructured interviews and purposive sampling which continued until data saturation. Conventional content analysis was applied to analyze the data. Results: During data analysis, three main themes resulted including "negligence and indulgence" with self-protection and patient protection as the subcategories, "communicative capability" with interpersonal relationship and relationship between occupational groups as the subcategories, and "management competencies" with providing the ward necessities and creating confidence in nurses as the subcategories. The experiences and functioning dimensions of head nurses were found as the concerns in managing the ward or self-protection in the clinical management. Conclusion: This study indicated that the communication and management abilities were not practically effective, probably due to lack of applied management knowledge and also inappropriate structure and performance of the organization which causes unsatisfactory managerial behaviors and negligence and indulgence. Therefore, promoting communicative abilities and professional management in practice are inevitably necessary by head nurses.