Background:

Managing human resources, activities and administrative processes, are daily challenges that are intended to translate in the quality of assistance to users. The changes in the management paradigm in health units in Portugal determine that nurses who manage mental health and psychiatry contribute to the quality and productivity of services, which makes good time management essential.

Objective:

To understand the distribution of time by the activities of the five areas of competencies of the nurse manager, taking into account their personal characteristics and the clinical contexts of mental health and psychiatry.

Methodology:

Quantitative, descriptive and cross-sectional study, carried out in Portuguese psychiatric healthcare units. Intentional non-probabilistic sample of 48 nurse managers. Data collected with an online questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistics.

Results:

The average amount of time spent in carrying out the activities inherent to the Professional Practice, Ethics and Legal skills, Care Management and Human Resource Management is above two thirds of the total maximum score. In the Political Intervention and Advisory and Professional Development competencies, the average values are close to half, that is, those that the managers considered to spend less time. Care Management is the competence that, on average, managers considered spending more time in carrying out the activities that integrate it.

Conclusions:

It concludes an asymmetry in the distribution of the time allocated to the execution of the tasks inherent to each of the competencies of the nursing manager, namely in the Ethical and Legal Professional Practice, Human Resource Management and Care Management.

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