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Nurse Supervisor Job Description Template

A straightforward, yet engaging job description is one of the starting points in your journey to bring a new nurse supervisor on board at your hospital, medical office or medical facility. Take the time to write the best description you can, as it is most likely the first impression that potential candidates have of you and the hospital. Rather than pen a long-winded description, make clever use of limited space to detail required skills and qualifications and the background of your hospital. To give you an idea of what you could write, we have written a nurse supervisor job description sample below. Please use it to gather ideas for your own description so that you can hire the nurse supervisor who will best manage nurses and interact with patients.

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Nurse Supervisor Job Summary

As a nurse supervisor at John Doe General Hospital, you manage the patient care area on both a daily and long-term basis. You collaborate with head nurses to develop shift schedules for registered nurses, and you work to provide physical and emotional support for patients, friends and families.

Nurse Supervisor Job Responsibilities and Duties:

  • Work with head nurses to create optimal shift schedules
  • Coordinate the care of each patient on a shift and use methods such as email or text messaging to convey concerns
  • Receive reports from the nurse supervisor who had the shift prior to yours, and develop reports for the next shift to ensure smooth patient care
  • Receive, consider and convey patient and family concerns and grievances
  • Hire, orient and train RNs and other staff as necessary
  • Pinpoint staff and equipment needs in developing annual budgets
  • Fill in as necessary for absent nurses
  • Audit patient charts regularly to ensure accurate documentation
  • Provide hospital tours to patients’ families
  • Participate on committees such as infection control or safety

Nurse Supervisor Skills and Qualifications

  • Registered professional nurse with New Mexico licensure
  • Associate or bachelor’s degree in nursing
  • Team leader or supervisory experience (at least two years’ worth preferred)
  • Five years of acute care experience as a professional nurse
  • CPR and Basic Life Support (BLS) certification
  • Current Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) certification and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) certification, or ability to obtain such within 6 months of hire
  • Ability to often be on call 24 hours a day
  • Handle stress well
  • Excellent multi-tasker
  • Capable communicator on delicate topics
  • Bilingualism (English and Spanish) preferred but not necessary

Company Profile

At John Doe General Hospital in Acme Springs, New Mexico, we are dedicated to providing complete patient care for residents of Acme Springs County and surrounding areas. Our emergency room is staffed 24/7, and our services include a wide range of inpatient and outpatient options. From general surgery, laboratories, physical therapy, mammography, X-rays, MRIs and more, we have practically everything. Dr. Jefferson Jones and Dr. Hakim Patel, general surgeons with 40 years of experience between them, ensure that the hospital has surgical coverage 24/7.
John Doe General Hospital is a 40-bed facility that practices compassionate and professional care with a splash of humor. We offer above-average salaries for our workers because we believe in paying people what they are worth.

Writing a Job Description Best Practices

  • The nurse supervisor job description sample above can help as you craft your own description, but it’s important that you tailor it toward the needs and type of your hospital or medical facility. Also, check your final description against the following dos and don’ts.

    • Do write an accurate job title. When space permits, include phrases such as city or neighborhood location and hospital/medical facility type.
    • Do remember the call to action so that interested prospects know how to apply. An example might be, “Does this sound like you could be our next nurse supervisor? Click on this link to start your application today!”
    • Do distinguish between essential qualifications and those that are helpful but not required. For instance, bilingualism could be one such beneficial qualification for a nurse supervisor.
    • Don’t include only hard skills such as which computer programs nurse supervisors use and which certifications are required. Remember to include soft skills; common examples for a nurse supervisor are decision-making, multi-tasking and stress-handling skills.

      The nurse supervisor job description sample above is a good model to work from as you find the ideal fit for your hospital. Put an appropriate amount of thought and effort into it to reap maximum benefits later.

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Nurse Supervisor Job Responsibilities

Many a job responsibilities section commits the cardinal sin of job advertisements. They’re much too long and outright boring. This section should be the most substantial, but if your nurse supervisor job description looks like a dissertation, you’re including too much information. You only need 6-8 bullets to make your job description pop. Instead of focusing on how much you write, you should focus on how you write it.

The essential “how” is action-oriented writing. Action-oriented writing uses active verbs at the beginning of every sentence. This helps you avoid passive writing and imparts the job description with a stronger voice that involves the reader in the duties taking place, letting them envision themselves in the role. With active writing and a good summary of job functions, you can create an effective nurse supervisor job description in less than a page.

Take a look at this example of well-written nurse supervisor job responsibilities:

  • Coordinate nursing team members throughout intensive shift operations in a fast-paced environment
  • Schedule and allocate personnel based on availability and required staffing levels
  • Oversee shift operations to ensure full coverage for all patients; support patient care and treatment as needed
  • Provide supervision, direction and mentorship in high-stress emergency situations
  • Recruit, train and mentor new nursing team personnel
Nurse Supervisor Job Specifications

You don’t have time to wade through a thousand applications to find just one qualified applicant. Recruiting is a time-consuming process, but it doesn’t have to be. You can upgrade your nurse supervisor job description with a job qualifications and skills section that can cut down on the time you spend screening applicants while improving the quality of applicant overall.

The way to do this is easy. Just include five or six requirements for the job in your nurse supervisor job description. This list doesn’t need to be extensive; it’s just the criteria to mark as pass or fail when screening candidates for the next stage of selection. Many candidates use these criteria to remove themselves from the running, cutting down on yet more unqualified applicants. In the meantime, you can reference the requirements as a checklist to significantly speed up application review.

Here’s our sample of nurse supervisor job specifications:

  • All RN licensing exams completed
  • Bachelor’s in nursing or other healthcare discipline highly preferred
  • 15 or more years of experience showing progressive leadership in hospital environment
  • Excellent team-building and organizational skills
  • Ability to remain calm and provide direction in a crisis
  • Capacity to remain physically mobile for up to 8 hours at a time

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Writing Your Nurse Supervisor Job Description: Dos and Don’ts

Congratulations on completing the first draft of your job description! Be sure to proofread for typos, and ask a few others to read over the text as well. Your next step before posting is to check the description against a few dos and don’ts to ensure it meets generally accepted best practices.

• Do include where the job is. You can never get too detailed; feel free to include neighborhood and address, or common landmarks (for example, “a block from the Space Needle.”)
• Do verify with the human resources department if you are allowed to share information on compensation in job descriptions. If permissible, you should do so to help ensure you and your candidates agree early in the process on such matters as salary, benefits and other forms of compensation.
• Don’t forget to include clear submission guidelines. Tell prospective candidates exactly what types of application materials they must submit, how, to whom and by when.
• Don’t assume that candidates will know everything about the job type. Include information such as whether your hospital is a teaching hospital, public or private, and so on. Also explain if evening or weekend work will be required (it often is for nurse supervisors).