Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety

This essay discusses the relationship between leadership style and patient safety in healthcare organizations. It defines leadership and patient safety, describes different leadership styles, analyzes the relationship between patient safety and leadership style, and critically evaluates two leadership styles. The essay concludes that effective leadership style plays an essential role in providing good care to patients and ensuring medication safety.

1
Running Head: Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLE AND
PATIENT SAFETY

2
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Definitions of leadership and patient safety...............................................................................3
Description of leadership styles.................................................................................................4
Relationship between patient safety and leadership style..........................................................4
Critical analysis of two leadership style.....................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
Reference list..............................................................................................................................9

3
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
Introduction
Leaders of healthcare industry face challenges in solving critical problems with their
critical thinking. This phenomenon of leadership ensures safety of patients by providing the
best quality patient care by healthcare staff including nurses. Leadership skills help
healthcare professionals to decide for navigating complicated healthcare setting. It is
important to select appropriate leadership style to ensure patient safety. Ensuring medication
safety is an important responsibility of healthcare organizations. This essay is focusing on
defining leadership and patient safety at the beginning.
Definitions of leadership and patient safety
Leadership:
This term can be defined as the ability of an individual or a group of individuals to
guide and influence followers and different other members in a company or institution. As
defined by Lin, MacLennan, Hunt & Cox (2015), leadership is a difficult process that
involves taking appropriate decisions and articulation and creating a clear vision that can
guide subordinates to achieve organizational goals.
Patient safety:
Patient safety is the absence of any preventable harm to a care receiver during the
process of healthcare. Moreover, patient safety can also be defined as protecting a patient
from different errors, infections, injuries and accidents in the healthcare setting as these
factors may increase complications of the patient (Hospitalsafetygrade.org, 2018).
Reduction of the risk related to unnecessary harm related to healthcare must be achieved to
an acceptable minimum.

4
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
Description of leadership styles
Democratic leadership style
This leadership in nursing is considered to be an effective one as it allows leaders to
listen to all employees before making the final decision. As opined by Vaismoradi, Griffiths,
Turunen & Jordan (2016), it allows employees to feel that they are an important part of the
organization and their opinions are valuable. Automatically, this leadership style increases
the involvement of all healthcare staff in the process of care giving. Democratic leadership
helps organizations to meet different needs of different kinds of patients and helps in ensuring
patient care. For example, in case of critical cases, this kind of leaders discuss with all
concerned subordinates while determining medication for ensuring patient safety. This kind
of approach of leaders can allow healthcare organization to administer the most appropriate
medication to the patient.
Transformational leadership style
This kind of leadership style is considered as a positive contributor to safety. In the
nursing field, consideration of this leadership style encourages nurses to provide their best
effort in all kinds of situations. Leaders with this style make changes of different practices of
nurses. This ensures different issues like medication safety and helps to achieve positive
patient care outcomes. As mentioned by Merrill (2015), productive and engaged team can be
formed by a transformational leader. In this case, the transformational leader must have
essential skills to influence others to change their way of working for ensuring better patient
care. Leaders must have inspiring trait that helps in ensuring teamwork. Moreover, this
leadership style ensures benefit for the concerned healthcare organization because bad
practices like poor medication safety can be changed through this style.

5
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
Relationship between patient safety and leadership style
Nursing leaders play a major role in changing the working environment and increase
safety of patient. As opined by Tyczkowski et al. (2015), leaders are positioned in a
healthcare setting for impacting in day to day operations. Effective leadership style in nursing
helps in improving quality of healthcare and increases satisfaction rate of patients. Adopting
and applying an appropriate leadership style of leaders in a healthcare setting helps in
increasing commitment of nurses and reduces the number of errors that impact on patient
safety. Quality of care is considered as a vital element for achieving high productivity in a
healthcare organization. Leaders can decrease errors in operations like improper medication,
which helps in gaining desired patient outcomes. As contradicted by Merrill (2015), effective
leadership style is considered as a key element in improving the quality of healthcare by
changing different improper practices. Behavior and practices of a nurse can be improved or
changed under supervision of efficient leaders. Moreover, Lin et al. (2015) argued that
inappropriate leadership style like laissez-faire leadership style can impact on quality of care
in a healthcare setting. In case of this leadership style, decision-making process is handed
over to subordinates. This approach can be defined as a style where a leader prefers to take a
backseat. However, different other leadership styles like transformational style help leaders to
guide subordinates in bringing a change in practices and behavior. Thus, quality of care and
patient safety enhances. For example, these errors can be solved through efficient guidance
and decision making of nurse leaders by applying effective style of leadership. Hence, it is
proved that choosing effective styles helps in achieving desired patient outcomes and ensures
the safety of patient. In addition, Tyczkowski et al. (2015) stated that leadership style has
been recognized as a major indicator for development of organizational culture and effective
performance during healthcare provision. Good planning and decision making by leaders and
delegating subordinates through appropriate leadership style can help in increase safety of

6
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
patients and desired health outcomes can be achieved. Nowadays, different regional and
national healthcare systems are trying to bring structural changes and redesigning functions to
eliminate errors and increase patient safety. Effective leadership styles helps in ensuring
different factors like medication safety. This is an essential issue that can be solved by
changing improper practices of nurses like making decisions regarding medication of patients
without proper discussion. Democratic leadership style helps to engage nurses to make
decisions about eliminating issues about factors like medication safety. On the other hand,
transformational leadership helps leaders to make changes in operations that ensure
medication safety and other issues like falls. Therefore, there is a direct relationship between
leadership style and patient safety as any leadership gap can increase errors and that can
impact on patient care or safety.
Critical analysis of two leadership style
Democratic leadership style allows all healthcare staff including nurses to share
their point of views based on their experience. However, Vaismoradi et al. (2016) have
mentioned that the ultimate decision is taken by the democratic leader after evaluation of all
the gathered information. It is effective in case of ensuring medication safety for patients. In
some of the cases, the level of injury or the health issue of the patient increases due to
inappropriate medication. In those cases, healthcare organization goes through legal
circumstances. On the other hand, patients and their family member suffer a lot. For avoiding
this kind of situation, medicines must be determined after consulting with available
healthcare professionals. For example, in case of emergency, healthcare team need to
administer basic medicines to save the life of the patient. In those cases, a huge responsibility
entitles on the concerned healthcare team. All of the team members share their opinion
regarding medication and the democratic leader make the final decision of medication for the

7
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
patient. On the contrary, the approach of the transformational leadership style is different
from the approach of democratic style of leadership. The five elements of transformational
leadership include two perspectives of idealized influence, inspirational motivation,
individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation. All of these aspects can help in
ensuring medication safety for patients by a transformational leader. For example, in case of
sudden changes in patient's condition, it is required to change the approach of determining
future medication process. In this kind of situation, transformational leaders encourage
medical team members to accept the change in the process of determination of medication
with a positive attitude. Considering situational changes, medication process needs to be
changed for ensure medication safety. This kind of leaders guides healthcare staff to change
their way of performing with the changes in the situation.
Democratic leadership style helps in providing value to the staff for motivating them
in performing well. Motivated staff feels that they are an important part of the organization
and provide their best effort in determining medication process for the patient. On the other
hand, Merrill (2015) have contradicted that transformational leaders educate staff to cope
up with sudden changes. This approach helps medical staff to change their way of treatment
as per changes in the physical condition of the patient. Democratic leaders collaborate with
team members to ensure medical safety and transformational leaders make changes in the
treatment process based on situations to ensure medical safety. Lin et al. (2015) have
contradicted that in both of the cases; the aim of the leaders is to gain the best effort from
their employees at any kind of situations. Both of the approaches are effective for ensuring
medication safety.

8
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it can be concluded that leadership style plays an essential
role in providing good care to patients. Effective leadership style helps in guiding nurses to
conduct good practices by implementing skills and proper decision making. Incidents of
medication error are increasing and organizations are facing legal issues due to this fact. It
has become important to select appropriate leadership style for ensure medication safety for
patients. Increasing medication safety can be done properly by the help of transformational
leadership as it helps in applying a change in an organization. Moreover, democratic
leadership style can also help to motivate and guide nurses to conduct practices that enhance
the safety of patients.

9
Relationship Between Leadership Style And Patient Safety
Reference list
Hospitalsafetygrade.org (2018), Patient safety, retrieved on 19th august 2019 from
https://www.hospitalsafetygrade.org/what-is-patient-safety_m
Lin, P. Y., MacLennan, S., Hunt, N., & Cox, T. (2015). The influences of nursing
transformational leadership style on the quality of nurses’ working lives in Taiwan: a
cross-sectional quantitative study. BMC nursing, 14(1), 33. Retrieved from:
https://bmcnurs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12912-015-0082-x
Merrill, K. C. (2015). Leadership style and patient safety: implications for nurse
managers. Journal of Nursing administration, 45(6), 319-324. Retrieved from:
https://journals.lww.com/jonajournal/FullText/2015/06000/Leadership_Style_and_Pat
ient_Safety__Implications.8.aspx
Tyczkowski, B., Vandenhouten, C., Reilly, J., Bansal, G., Kubsch, S. M., & Jakkola, R.
(2015). Emotional intelligence (EI) and nursing leadership styles among nurse
managers. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 39(2), 172-180. Retrieved from:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8a67/f185305e7895cd48aeb9f09297de7d3c3599.pdf
Vaismoradi, M., Griffiths, P., Turunen, H., & Jordan, S. (2016). Transformational leadership
in nursing and medication safety education: a discussion paper. Journal of nursing
management, 24(7), 970-980. Retrieved from:
https://nordopen.nord.no/nord-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2388848/
Vaismoradi.pdf?sequence=3