Leadership & Management in Nursing

Well here we go with my first blog post. In relating this blog to management or leadership in nursing...I would say my work place is suffering from a serious mismanagement problem. We have lost a large portion of our patient population to a competing facility. This happened in March of 08. The corporation agreed to guarantee all staffs hours for one year in exchange for not having a mass exodus from our unit. They did give us our hours but only for seven months, now we are losing 1-2 shifts out of 3 (12 hour) shifts per week to cancellation. We cancel 5-6 RN's per shift.
This problem could have been averted had management been proactive 7 months ago. The company was paying us to come to work as "work crew" for 7 months when they could have been orienting us to other units with staffing shortages. Their fear was that we would be busy with orientation and be short on our current unit. Yes it was a possibility but creativity could have solved that problem.
The most frustrating part of this whole process has been the mismanagement of funds. We may not have been able to walk onto another unit and taken an RN load but with patients in hallway beds couldn't we have been of some assistance? Instead we goofed around for months! Idle hands are never happy hands and our patient satisfaction scores reflect this.