Nowadays, many hospitals, as well as their employees and leaders, are involved in numerous competitions. Doctors and nurses need to act in advance to avoid challenges and medical errors. However, the management of hospitals should also be of the highest quality (Ghanem et al. 2015). For example, several years ago, nearly 98,000 deaths were reported as a result of medical errors and poor management (Frese & Keith 2015). Deaths because of respiratory diseases lead the list of causes of death worldwide, including 8.6 million of people dying because of tuberculosis and 180,000 annual deaths due to of asthma (Ferkol & Schraufnagel 2014). Thus, it is necessary to improve management practices in hospitals, and in respiratory departments in particular, in order to enhance the quality of care. It is likely that to do that, management positions in hospitals should be occupied by professional managers rather than nurses without training in management, even in cases when nurses run departments of their specialization. Mismanagement of the respiratory department must not create challenges for patients. Thus, because nurses do not have management education, the correctness of the idea that nurses of a respiratory department should perform the role of managers there must be put under question. Nursing knowledge is not enough to become a good manager, as well as a manager cannot perform the duties of a nurse. Everything should have its own place and goal. In many hospitals, it is expected that nurses should manage the work of the department. However, it is apparently wrong to place a nurse without a background in management as a manager. Numerous management mistakes may occur. Mismanagement of the department is a problem that has to be solved. This research aims to identify the duties of nurses and managers in the respiratory department, and, therefore, to ascertain the aspects that differentiate the work of nurses from the work of managers, consequently demonstrating that neither of the professionals can appropriately play the role of the other one. My task is to formulate a research topic and demonstrate my readiness to work on it. As a management student, I realize that research basics have to be identified and explained (Collins & Hussey 2013). I have already searched the Internet and found several strong projects about the importance of management strategies in hospitals (Ghanem et al. 2015) and the role of managers in hospital success (Parand et al. 2014). Regarding the results of my search, I aim at investigating the challenges of a mismanaged respiratory hospital department and to identify whether these management mistakes made by a nurse would be likely to be made by a professional manager. Similar topics have already been investigated in the academic literature, and there are two strong research papers by Ghanem et al. (2015) and Parand et al. (2014) about hospital management, nurses’ roles, and service improvements that motivate my thoughts and suggest the appropriateness and relevance of my research topic. However, I do not want to focus on common strategies and the work of general hospitals. My task is to choose one mismanaged respiratory department, to investigate