Nurses function as both leaders and managers in their organizations. Nurse leaders’ role is to improve healthcare quality and to increase patient satisfaction. These can be achieved through transactional and transformational leadership methods. Nursing leadership is associated with better-quality patient outcomes, enhanced staff retention, promotion of a better workplace, and reduced medical errors.
Nurse leaders ensure the safe delivery of services in the hospital. Therefore, there is a need for familiarity with the profession’s safety protocols and standards and their healthcare facility (Sammut & Scicluna, 2020). They also monitor the nursing received by patients to guarantee that nursing staff members are working towards optimizing good standards at all times. Through transformational leadership, the nurse leader sets an example to the team. This reduces medical errors because things are done more carefully inside the hospital, and patients receive better care and treatment, resulting in low patient mortality. The nurse leader focuses on fellow staff members through transactional leadership, resulting in few or no errors committed due to supervision (Alzahrani & Hasan, 2019). Motivating, supporting, rewarding, and inspiring team members also has a positive outcome.
There are barriers hindering nurse leaders from practicing their involvement in strategic activities, including lack of involvement, the undesirable image of nursing from the public, and lack of organized structure. Leaders are not included in the whole process and instead called on an impromptu basis hence inadequate preparation and representation in the policy process. A negative image from the public makes their potential contribution not recognized to be significant hence excluded by policymakers (McCay et al., 2018). Lastly, many policy improvement appointments are awarded to doctors and other professionals in the health sector who become representatives of nursing issues at policy forums, while relatively junior positions are for nurses. They set policies, while nurses implement them leading to deficiency of experience. Nurse leaders should be involved in policy processes for a better healthcare system.
References
Alzahrani, S., & Hasan, A. A. (2019). Transformational leadership style on nursing job satisfaction amongst nurses in hospital settings: Findings from systematic review. Global Journal of Health Science, 11(6), 25. Web.
McCay, R., Lyles, A. A., & Larkey, L. (2018). Nurse leadership style, nurse satisfaction, and patient satisfaction. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 33(4), 361-367. Web.
Sammut, R., & Scicluna, A. (2020). Nurses’ and nurse managers’ perceived transformational leadership behavioural practices: A survey. Leadership in Health Services, 33(4), 385-396. Web.