Importance of Nursing Leadership in Improving Patient Care

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Clinical Leadership in Nursing
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Introduction
An ideal leader is a person who leads the team from front while providing guidance
and motivation to the team leaders so that they are perform as per the expectations and at
times might exceeds the bar of expectations. In the healthcare domain, nurses play an
important role in delivering effective care to the patients. Since the nurses are the first line of
contact for the patients’ the nurse roles is regarded as one of the determining trait behind
improving overall healthcare quality (Scott & Miles, 2013). Scully (2015) stated that any
errors in the nursing care plan like medication error, documentation error leads to adverse
health outcome.
Past research that has been undertaken over quality improvement in the nursing
profession has mainly focused on how proper working environment like stress, work pressure
and bullying modulates the overall quality of nursing care. However, no significant research
has yet been undertaken in order to analyze the efficacy of the nursing leadership in
improving the overall service delivery and thereby helping to improve the overall outcome of
care (Wong, Cummings & Ducharme, 2013). The following paper aims towards highlighting
the importance of the nursing leadership under clinical settings in order to improve the
overall outcome of care. In doing so, the paper will focus of four different literary articles
focused on different nursing leadership styles and how they are effective in bringing change
in the nursing professionals. The analysis of the literary articles will be done based on the
identification of the leadership styles, recommendations cited in the articles along with
presence of limitations in the research (if any).
Discussion
The four papers that are selected for the process of review of the clinical leadership
style in nursing and published within the last 7 years and are mainly focused on three

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different styles of leaderships namely transformational leadership, transactional leadership
and autocratic leadership styles under diverse clinical settings like emergency unit and
intensive care unit.
Role of transformation leadership in improving patients’ safety
Nurses play an important role in delivering proper care to the patients. In this relation
to Boamah, Laschinger, Wong and Clarke (2018) conducted a study in order to analyze how
the safety quotient of the patient can be increased within the healthcare organisation by
implementation of the effective leadership styles. Here the author mainly focused on a
particular leadership style that is transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is
defined as an inspirational leadership that is used by the nurse managers for motivating their
team members so that they can out-perform the level of expectations (Giltinane, 2013).
Boamah, Laschinger, Wong and Clarke (2018) mainly selected the nursing professionals
operating in the acute care centres of Ontario. The selection of the prospective candidates for
the study was done by the use of random sampling and this lead to recruitment of 378 nurses.
A cross-sectional survey was performed and the analysis of the data highlighted that
transformational leadership plays a significant role in influencing the empowerment of the
nursing professionals and this helps to improve the overall level of job satisfaction. The
cross-sectional survey also revealed that proper use of the transformational leadership style is
effective in increasing the level of patients’ satisfaction by improving the overall outcome of
care an reducing the chances of occurrence of adverse health-related outcomes. The authors
concluded by saying the transformational leadership helps in improving patients’ health-
related safety as by improving the job satisfaction and this helps to reduce the chances of the
medication errors. The study recommended that the nurse professionals who are working in
words with high patients;s strength like the intensive care unit must preach transformational