Identify the soft skills required by the hospital nursing workforce in the organizational hierarchy

Many human resource management practices such as hiring, selecting, and planning the workforce in different ways, regardless of skills, are far from organizational realities. Indeed, different levels of the organization need different skills, and awareness of this difference and the common denominator of these skills allows flexible and fluid planning in the organization. This study has identified the soft skills of the nursing workforce at three levels of nurse, head nurse, and supervisor for all wards of a private hospital using the lived experience of the nursing workforce. For this purpose, with the help of semi-structured interviews with organizational experts, five components of basic/general skills, social skills, problem-solving skills, system-related skills, resource management skills, and 20 sub-components of effective listening, verbal skills, self-motivation, text comprehension, maturity Organizational Thinking, Writing, Critical Thinking, Supervision, Social Perception, Service, Training, Coordination, Persuasion, Problem Solving in Crisis, Decision Making, System Understanding and Analysis, System Understanding and Evaluation, Time Management, Human Resource Management, and Asset Management The title of soft skills required by the nursing staff of this hospital was counted. Numerous studies have identified some of the soft skills required by nurses and the single-level workforce. However, this study identifies the skills of the nursing workforce in the nursing hierarchy in the hospital wards.

Competence and skill are concepts that are hidden in various management topics, including human resource management. When it comes to strategic human resource management, creating equal or superior capabilities is through employees who are irreplaceable and unimaginable, which refers to the expertise and skills of individuals. The effective delivery of health services is seriously affected by human resources, and significant issues in this area include inadequate numbers, skills, distribution methods, and staff performance. Studies have not identified the skills of the nursing workforce concerning their different levels in all wards of the hospital, which leads to a variety of soft skills of the nursing workforce.
Case study
The study organization is a private hospital in Mashhad that has ten medical wards.

This study is from the perspective of the interpretive paradigm, and the dominant approach of this research is qualitative. The skills required by the nurses were identified based on the experience (lived experience) gained by the nursing workforce of the study hospital. Given what has been mentioned, the appropriate strategy for this important phenomenon is phenomenology. In this study, semi-structured interviews were used to collect data, and in order to analyze the collected data, the modified Colaizzi's seven-step method was adopted.

From the analysis of the collected data, five themes, "Basic/general skills, social skills, problem-solving skills, system-related skills, resource management skills" and 20 sub-components of effective listening, verbal skills, self-motivation, Comprehension of texts, organizational intellectual maturity, writing, critical thinking, supervision, social understanding, service, education, coordination, persuasion, problem-solving in critical situations, decision making, system understanding and analysis, system understanding and evaluation, time management, human resource management, and asset management were counted as human skills required by the nursing workforce of the hospital.

General / basic skills, social skills and problem solving skills are common to all nurses in hospital wards. The reason can be considered in the nature of the nursing job, the patients’ type of nurses and the difficulties and hardships of this job. For example, unlike the two wards of eight and the ICU, in the social skills set, the need of NICU nurses for training skills was identified, the reason being the need for care training for the baby's parents. Persuasion skills were not mentioned in the interview process due to the type of patients in this ward (infants). Meanwhile, critical thinking and monitoring skills were not identified as the skills required by nurses in the interview process. The skills identified in the nurses of all wards of the hospital are common and in the interview process, they expressed the required skills with a supervisory and managerial perspective. The skills identified in hospital supervisors differed in basic / general skills. For example, in the post of clinical supervisor, only writing skills, critical thinking and supervision were identified, and the reason for this can be found in the nature of this post, which is in this way the head of nursing in this hospital and the deputy director of nursing services. For this reason, unlike other supervisor posts, this post must also have the skill of managing hospital assets in medical treatment. Writing and supervision skills were identified in the subspecies of basic / general skills of Post-Supervisor Infection Control, which plays a key role in establishing information communication between different departments and developing guidelines for infection control in hospitals. The training supervisor, who is in charge of conducting the training course in coordination with other departments, saw a greater need to discuss basic / general skills in this post.