Nursing Leaders

In many organizations, there is a managerial and technical group

This is replicated in healthcare provision and specifically in nursing. In the field of nursing, there are leaders and their managers that strive to provide leadership to the nurses with a view of improving health services. This paper aims to explore various beliefs as well as approaches that these nursing leaders and managers have various issues that occur in the nursing profession. This is crucial as these approaches affect the morale of nurses, the quality of services they deliver and ultimately the health of society (Graban, 2012).

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Nursing leaders and managers adopt varying attitudes toward nurses and the workplace

Some of them have their own perception of nurse’s attitude toward work. Leadership can be viewed in a broad sense as the process through which an agent influences the subordinates with a view of making them work willingly and with enthusiasm in order to achieve set goals and objectives. This process of influencing subordinates and workers takes various forms as management theories suggest. For instance, it is very common to see managers and leaders with a traditional view of management assuming that nurses and other workers have a negative attitude toward work. This makes such people to stimulate workers with a view to make them work. On the other hand, other management theories allow a greater extent of freedom and responsibility to nurses and lead to a higher output compared to the former approach (Hereford & Lui, 2011).

As nurse leaders and managers have varying attitudes as well as approaches to nurses, they apply these approaches to various issues that occur in nurses’ practices. Continuous quality improvement and patient satisfaction are some of the goals many healthcare providers are recently struggling to attain. This has been proposed to possess the ability to improve patient care and hence contribute to a healthier society. This has led to introduction of positions such as clinical nurse leaders (CNL) and a training program for them to accelerate the realization of this goal. This has been done to boost the efforts of nurse managers (Sollecito & Johnson, 2013)

The result of continuous quality improvement and patient satisfaction plan will be dependent on a wide range of factors. One factor that will greatly influence the success of this scheme is the approach of nurse leaders, as well as their managers, will have on this new plan. This is because the whole process will involve the leaders trying to influence their workers positively so that they can enthusiastically strive to attain this goal. This is a multidimensional arrangement and all participants need to be brought on board.

One of the approaches that some nurse managers and leaders have adopted is an autocratic mode of leadership. According to this approach, all nurses respond to a direct order from above and no one is allowed to question or contribute. Knowledge and experience of nurses as well as other specialists that are below managers and nurse leaders are ignored. This approach is not result based. Managers do not have time to analyze feedback from the recipients of patient care and the community in general. Another important aspect that takes backstage in this form is the comparison of costs and benefits. This approach has led to heavy capital expenditure, demotivated nurses and dissatisfied patients (Dochterman & Grace, 1997).

Bureaucratic approach of these emerging issues has not brought any better results compare to autocratic one. This is a slow response system as a multitude of laws and rules have to be followed strictly. This makes this approach to be unresponsive to the ever changing needs of patients as well as the clients have. Modern management specialists say this system is slowed down in features, details as well as rules.

Other nursing leaders and managers take another approach that is totally different to the above two. This assumes that all nurses and other specialists are well trained, and each can carry out their role without interferences. This makes leaders stop bothering themselves with any nurse or other specialist. Clients are served according to each and every nurse’s objective. Aspect such as collecting responses from the field and analyzing them may not be important as the whole organization is not working toward a common goal. This system fails because of lack of coordination. There is also reduced sense of responsibility as everyone is a boss in his area. This approach that is described as laissez-faire is lacking result delivery and is unsuitable in many aspects as described earlier.

The approach that can be recommended for greatly increased output where continuous quality improvement and patient satisfaction are the ultimate goal should be participated in nature. Leaders need to work closely with nurses in order to influence them positively (Blais & Hayes, 2011). This is considering that nurses too are well trained, and some of them have a valuable experience that can be utilized to improve patient care. For this reason, their active precipitation in providing ideas is greatly encouraged.

After a healthy working relationship is nurtured, data collection in the field is of utmost importance

This data should be analyzed in order to assess client satisfaction. Research has to be done on continuous bases in order to determine the ever changing needs of recipients of patient care. In addition to determine the needs of the clients, patients can also be involved for instance in nurses turnover program. Views of patients should be utilized to make care more responsive and useful. Economists should also participate so that the ever diminishing resources are well utilized to provide continuous quality patient care to consumers. Effective participation of all parties will lead to continuously satisfied clients and community in general.

As compared to approaches such as autocratic, bureaucratic and laissez-faire, participative approach is the most recommended. This is because it combines the best from various parties to better quality of patient care and patient satisfaction. From the management perspective, it goes in line with the management theory Z. This Japanese approach to management views a workplace as a place with diverse talents and abilities. Contrary to management theory X, both managers and employees are viewed as capable of offering different but crucial contributions for development and are actively engaged (Marquis & Huston, 2009.)

Similarly, nursing leaders, managers, nurses can work together to continuously improve patient care and satisfaction if each group and individual’s contributions are taken into careful consideration. Additionally, patients, being the recipients of services, can help improve this working relationship too.

For the purpose of continuity, research becomes important. Patients’ needs change rapidly. For this reason, any person as well as organization trying to satisfy these needs must continuously point them out correctly. Satisfaction involves giving the best and meeting recipient’s expectation. As needs increase, resources diminish. This calls for careful analysis to utilize the available resources effectively. For this reason, economists and other resources utilization specialists are required. This is to ensure that nursing leaders, managers and nurses are able to continuously provide improved and satisfying care as depletion of resources is avoided (Fabre, 2005).

In conclusion, participation is not only beneficial as a leadership approach to issues in the nursing practice but has far reaching consequences. It goes hand in hand with nurses’ deep desire to provide the best care to a patient hence enhancing quick recovery.

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