The healthcare sector faces continuous reforms to deliver effective, safe, and high-quality care. Driving these changes calls for effective leadership at all levels of the health system to actualize the objectives of the reforms. Leadership in the health care system creates peculiar challenges since it is spread across clinical and management workforces. Leadership styles depend on personalities, and leaders have unique characteristics that they use to complement their styles of leadership (Gandolfi, 2018). Successful leaders prosper in different health care sections, including nurse job satisfaction, staff recruitment and retention, patient outcomes, and an improved work environment. Some people think leaders are made through practice, mentoring, and experience, while others believe leadership is an inborn quality. In my opinion, some leaders are born, and others are made. Some people are born with unique personalities of leadership. Some acquire leadership characteristics through experience and mentoring.
One of the leaders I greatly admire in the health care sector is Doctor Michael R. Walker. Although I have never had the opportunity to meet him, I have read a lot about the reforms he has spearheaded in the health care sector, especially as the founder of Chester County-based Genesis Healthcare. The healthcare facility became the US’s largest post-acute and nursing home care provider (Michael, 2020). He showed great leadership examples as the facility’s CEO from 1985 to 2002 through true visionary for the healthcare industry. Additionally, Walker had a philosophy that nursing homes should be proactive centers of health care instead of centers focusing on custodial care for the elderly. He also collaborated with community leaders to develop different proposals for Kennett Squire, Pa., based on his belief in helping the community if you have the chance.
Walker faced some of the problems associated with the rural health care facilities that originate from single demographics. Most people living in small rural towns such as Kennett Squire are the elderly. It is contrary to the population in most urban settings, mostly occupied by youths and young adults. These people have limited resources for obtaining quality health care and may ignore things like blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol levels until they face health crises (Michael, 2020). Another challenge Walker faced was inadequate access to specialized medical care leading to limited staff, technical, and financial resources in rural areas. Tackling these challenges requires encouraging private sector investment, public and private funds, and economic development in rural areas.
References
Gandolfi, F., & Stone, S. (2018). Leadership, leadership styles, and servant leadership. Journal of Management Research, 18(4), 261-269.
Michael Richmond Walker (2020). Kuzo and Foulk Funeral Homes. Web.