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Secnerio Based Clinical Leadership And Patient Care Essay
Scenario Based Clinical Leadership and Patient Care Essay
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Scenario Based Clinical Leadership and Patient Care Essay
Introduction
The health care industry is transforming vigorously based on the requirements of better care services and patient safety and principles. Effective leadership is the basic necessity for achieving anticipated standards of patient safety in a health care system. Within a health care work force system, nursing leaders are required to motivate the followers to utilize their maximum potential. Leadership can be defined as the ability individuals to lead and influence others into following them towards the accomplishment of desired objectives. Strong leadership skills can ensure patient safety in a health care facility. But it is very important to understand the concept of patient safety. Patient safety culture is the outcome of some individuals’ behaviour patterns, capabilities, perceptions and commitment that determine the proficiency of health delivery and safety management. The fundamental responsibility of nursing leaders is to understand the nature and implications of components of patient safety in a health care setup.
Leadership in patient safety culture
Leadership in a health care organization has the competency to acknowledge that environment in such a setting is high-risk. Nursing leaders adjust their tasks so that they can make the health care work force competent enough to use the economic and anthropological resources to guarantee patient safety. Patient care revolves around the patients and their families and they also serve as a liaison between organization and societies. Leaders engage in designing strategies and framework that monitor the safety process and their consequences. Literature has stated that the most efficient facilitators of patient safety culture are administrative leaders (Hillege, 2014). It is suggested that the safety culture should start from the highest levels in the health care work force and then pass on to all the levels.
The health care systems work with the goals of utilizing their effective leadership for ensuring the finest global care delivery. It has now become a global urgency and different organizations and inter-professional work in collaborations to provide the effective care to the patients. In a system, where medical practitioners, researchers and policy makers all work in closed efforts for the promotion of safety culture, it cannot be achieved without nursing leaderships. A number of leadership styles are adopted for enhancing the care quality and safety in health care organizations. The well-known styles namely transcriptional, transformational and laissez-faire are used. But researchers have suggested that for achieving the superlative outcomes within an organization, transformational style is most efficient (Curtis, de Vries, & Sheerin, 2011).
Leaders that follows transformational style are preemptive and have strong influential powers over their followers in convincing them to struggle hard to achieve better results of performance. Such leaders earn high admirations and seek superiority among others. They instill inspiration and acknowledge workers for their achievements. They are optimistic about future and expressive about the aims and objectives their teams have to achieve. This style is associated with increased satisfaction of the job, staff wellbeing, less stress at the workplace and less staff turnover.
The transcriptional style of leadership involves social exchange of inflicting the authority and motivating the followers. During emergency situations, autocratic leadership proves to be the best option as leaders take decisions entirely based on their own intuitions and without asking the subordinates’ opinions. This social exchange of ideas may occur by two different methods; active management by exception or contingent rewards. Active management by exception method is used as a counteractive action style. Leaders who follow this style look into the queries when instantaneous act is necessary but this method does not guarantee the long term commitment. Leaders who adopt contingent reward strategy are unable to motivate employees in engaging and committing to the organization as there is lack of inspiration but its response is still better than active management by exception strategy. When a task is accomplished successfully, rewards are given to the employees in the form of bonuses, incentives and appreciations. But in the case of failure in achievement of the assigned task, punishments are inflicted in the form of salary deduction and in some severe cases termination may occur. Before the implementation of transformational style of leadership, transcriptional style was used in health care organizations as the most effective leadership style.
The laissez-faire style of leadership is considered as the direct opposite of transformational style of leadership. It is mainly regarded by inactive management by exception. Leaders who adopt a passive strategy in work force anticipate until the issues become quite serious before intervening. This method is followed by leaders who have to deal with a large amount of direct queries or whose employment entails them to be absent from work. This type of leadership style is professed as less effective in contrast to other styles (Merrill, 2015). In this type of leadership methodology, the employees make decisions based on their own conscience without the direction of the leaders. In the absence of leaders where patient safety is the utmost priority, nurses, consultants, researchers, educators and other employees think through together and formulate an efficient strategy (Marquis & Huston, 2015).
Nursing leaders follow a well-defined scheme to certify the patient safety in any health care related situation. In the efforts of achieving resourceful safety culture, health care work force should have three main core competencies; information related to medicine administration and medicine error, safety measurements for staff nurses and competent nursing leadership. Role of nurse leaders cannot be compromised in care management and medicine delivery while following all safety principles. The choice of leadership style is also a critical step in maintaining a profound patient safety culture.
The transcriptional and transformational styles of leadership are mainly performance based. As the focus of global health care communities is promptly on the acquisition of higher levels of safety modules, nursing staff has to face tough challenges. It is the need of the day for care giving organizations to have more flexible and adaptive styles of leadership. Authoritative leaderships are only concerned with the achievement of task and so is not much suitable for the guaranteed satisfactory results (Jurek & Scime, 2013). Laissez-faire style does not provide means for learning of advanced procedures and new methods of drug administration. But the transcriptional and transformational methods are quite dynamic and strongly believe in accomplishment of organization’s objectives through unparalleled commitment. It is very important that the leadership is very effective and responsive as staff satisfaction should be made mandatory. Studies have suggested that nurses who are contented with their leadership and the mode of authority, show more commitment towards their work and aspire high levels of professionalism. In order to attain an effective leadership, a mutual understanding among nursing scholars, educators, and managers is very essential. It also has a positive impact on patient’s response towards the health care.
Though the health care systems work with utmost commitment for the provision of patient safety but still there are hurdles in the pursuit of attaining error free safety. The main problem in such situations is the lack of proper accountability and pellucidity in the honest reporting of errors in medical practice. The hallmarks of a reliable care organizations are that possible and adverse errors be reported immediately and the safe solution be sorted out (Moller, 2013). But admitting the flaws during practice can create a serious dilemma as public has expectations with health care organizations. Coming forward and disclosing the mistakes exposes the offenders to criticism and accountability. It may also result in inciting serious disciplinary actions by the managers, regulatory authorities and legal system. Feared from these consequences, the offenders refrain from exposing themselves especially when there is no harm to patient safety. Examples like these lead to the failure of accountability system in medical community and it leaves the next patients prone to similar kind of negligence. In medical culture there should be some flexibility to understand and accept that most of the mistakes might occur because of multiple human and accidental errors instead of deliberate acts of negligence. In such capacities, nursing leaders need to play an important role for the promotion of ethical and a reliable work environment where nurses and care delivery staff feel confident in reporting such events and morally responsible.
Conclusion
Strong nursing leadership attributes and the quality of patient safety are directly proportional. Leaders need not only to have management and authoritative roles but in order to ensure the competency of their organizations, they need to understand the safe medicine practices and safety protocols. An effective leadership is essential for health care staff and patients’ satisfaction to the quality of services provided. The method of leadership matters a lot in critical decision making and achieving health safety goals. Transcriptional and transformational styles of leadership have proved to be more competent as they instill elements of motivation and commitment among their followers. Health care organizations have their own specific organizational culture as per the characteristics such as behaviour, beliefs and moral values. These attributes vary among all the individuals working in the organization. But through efficient leadership, accountability and excellence can be achieved for implementing patient safety improvement strategies.
References
Cuitis, E.A., de Vries, J., &Sheerin, F. K. (2011). Developing leadership in nursing: Exploring core factors. British Journal of Nursing 20(5), 306-309.
Hillege, S. (2014). Safety. In J, Dempsey, S. Hillege& R. Hill (Eds.).Fundermentals of nursing and midwifery: A person-centred approach to care (2nd Australian and New Zealand ed., pp. 664-683). Sydney, Australia: Lippincott William & Wilkins.
Jurek, S. &Scime, A. (2013). Achieving Democratic Leadership: A Data-Mined Prescription. Social Science Quarterly, 95(1), 97-110.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12035.
Marquis, B. L., & Huston. C. J. (2015). Classical views of leadership and management. In Leadership roles and management functions in nursing: Theory and application (8th ed., pp. 33-48). Philadelphia, PA: Wolters Kluwer Health
Merrill, K. (2015). Leadership Style and Patient Safety. JONA: The Journal Of Nursing Administration, 45(6), 319-324. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/nna.0000000000000207.
Moller, J. (2013).Leadership, Accountability, and Patient Safety.Journal Of Obstetric, Gynecologic& Neonatal Nursing, 42(5), 506-507.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1552-6909.12241
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