Leadership qualities are essential for all spheres of work, and the nursing sector is not an exception. Learning to be an entrepreneur can help enhance personal qualities that might be useful with work duties management. The nursing practice involves a variety of functions uniting different chains of health policies. Medical care is an essential part of nurses’ work; however, the assessment of care delivery and patient satisfaction primarily is on nurses’ duty. In rural areas, the role of nurses raise as the majority of the countryside population has lower a level of general medical knowledge and needs extra education.
Nurse leaders in rural areas can organize meetings about obligatory immunizations, the importance of medication intake, and the effects of a healthy lifestyle. Nurses have always been the major specialists that helped reduce the shortage of healthcare professionals in primary care (Ortiz et al., 2018). Nurse leaders can also gather and analyze the major issues in the healthcare system and cooperate with the elected leader in problem-solving and decision-making. Nurses themselves can take political leadership positions and collaborate with various community front-runners, professionals from other disciplines in order to meet healthcare necessities. Therefore, the effectiveness of the rural healthcare system and the treatment outcomes in countryside areas can be increased significantly.
Regarding the strengths of the rural community, it is essential to emphasize the diversity of the pathologies along with the lack of innovative equipment. Due to that, the healthcare professionals develop as high-quality specialists and can tackle various complicated issues regarding the diagnosis, treatment tactics, and cooperation with other physicians. Nurses practicing in rural areas can grow as decent professionals faster than in big city centers, and this can be used as a first step of raising high-quality specialists in short periods of time. Barnes et al. (2018) have estimated the increase of nursing practitioners in rural areas from 15,9% to 23,0 from 2008 to 2016 respectively. Along with that, the researchers evaluated the increased level of healthcare delivery and patient satisfaction (Bernes et al., 2018). Thus, the nurses can take action in the improvement of the primary care, patient education, and healthcare policies taking leadership positions.
Nevertheless, a classic perception is that the profession of a nurse is about caring, and being an entrepreneur is about focusing on benefits. Amy Wilkinson in the TED talk video discloses the wide variety of qualities of true entrepreneurs (Wilkinson, 2018). It becomes clear that a person developing features of a businessman can easily implement them in everyday life receiving profits from personal actions, not business performance. Nurse practitioners, involving leaders need to think like an entrepreneur as they are the chain between the healthcare policymakers and patients, and they can assess the quality of care and the gaps in the system.
For instance, Wilkinson advises to fly out of the OODA loop which stands for “observe, orient, decide and act” (Wilkinson, 2018). This strategy means that getting into the decision loop and moving fastly to the action can help be one step further than the competitor and win the game. In healthcare, this advice can be implemented in terms of successful treatment or a fast action after receiving feedback from the patient. Medicine needs quick and creative decisions from the practitioners as patients are individual and each of them needs a wise specific approach, and various attention levels. Moreover, Wilkinson advises to fail wisely and reflect on the mistakes that have already been done. A lot of shortcomings are met in the daily nurse practice and analyzing the possible changes can help develop the healthcare outcomes and come to other useful ways of work. Therefore, we see how entrepreneur features can be implemented in various spheres of human life. Nurse practitioners and nurse leaders need to provide both care and leadership analysis to enhance healthcare outcomes from various angles.
References
Barnes, H., Richards, M. R., McHugh, M. D., & Martsolf, G. (2018). Rural and nonrural primary care physician practices increasingly rely on nurse practitioners. Health Affairs, 37(6), 908-914.
Ortiz, J., Hofler, R., Bushy, A., Lin, Y., Khanijahani, A., & Bitney, A. (2018). Impact of nurse practitioner practice regulations on rural population health outcomes. Healthcare, 6(2), 65.
Wilkinson, A. (2018). The secret of how to think like an entrepreneur [Video]. TED.