The Role of Nurse Leaders in Healthcare

This assignment delves into the significant impact of nurse leaders within the healthcare sector. It emphasizes their broad knowledge encompassing political, economic, social, and clinical aspects. The document highlights how nurse leaders leverage their expertise to advocate for strategic development in nursing and the broader healthcare workforce. Furthermore, it underscores their ability to contribute to an effective, efficient, and responsive healthcare system by addressing financial, cultural, and social barriers faced by patients and healthcare providers.

Running head: OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
Overall analysis of leadership in nursing
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Running head: OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING

1OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
PART A
Mind Map

Running head: OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING

Running head: OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
PART B
The role of the nurse manager in a clinic or a hospital is pivotal. The nurse manager is
generally a registered nurse whose primary responsibility is to manage the deliverable
healthcare with both administrative and clinical approach. The primary role of the nurse
manager is to supervise the nurses and to manage the concerns of the family of the patient.
The nurse manager makes all the assignments for everyone including the supervisors
by assessing their strengths, experience levels and the patient’s requiring care. She makes
sure that all of the nursing stuff fulfils their job requirements and the patients get maximum
care.
The nurse managers also play a mentoring role by setting clear expectations for the
nurses under her wing. Nursing is always teamwork and the nurse manager has to see that if
there is any conflict within the team. The nurse manager has to solve the conflict by
encouraging the parties to meet and make amends with each other.
Sometimes, the patient and family get worried about the quality of the treatment. The
nurse manager has to be concerned about the welfare of the patient and has to discuss about
the course of the treatment. The nurse manager has to keep her priority straight and solve the
problem immediately.
Along with the leadership qualities, the nurse manager has to have the qualities to be
a great follower. The nurse manager has to be aware all the time and has to collaborate with
everybody from her unit. She has to have a philosophy that teaches the others to respect each
other and have to incorporate the professional integrity with the personal integrity (Huber,
2013). The nurse manager would also have to be courageous enough to stand up for everyone

1OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
in her team, including the nursing stuff and even the patient. She has to make sure, if all of
her stuffs are competent and trained enough to handle the daily delicate situations. Nursing is
always a tough job and the nurse manager has to be the one who has to keep the work
environment as much stress free as possible. The nurse manager has to be ethical as the other
unit members leans on her to give them value-abased judgment (Wong, Cummings, &
Ducharme, 2013).
The nurse manager has many roles as she has to merge the proximity of labor relation,
personnel management, and human relation. That nurse manager who is able to merge all
these proximities successfully to provide the hospital a healthy workforce with good labor
relation and enhanced competencies is called a successful manager.
Steffy and Grimes, who noted the critical theory, believes that the qualitative analysis
is an important tool to do the quantitative research. This theory works in nursing management
as well as most of the healthcare organizations are not value free (Northouse, 2015). The
critical theory uses a form of institutionalized reasoning that believes every aspect of
knowledge can be explicated by performing scientific procedure (Giltinane, 2013). This
theory is actually a contemporary school of thought that criticizes the repressive and
tyrannical values and instruction by examining the assumptions which provides support to the
thinking process.
The general system theory is an approach with studies relationships from the point of
view of an organization. This theory is actually an analogy between a person and an
organization. The nursing management application of this theory comes with nine different
levels. The nursing management is about maintaining the clockwork (Yammarino et al.,
2013). The nurse manager has to have adequate knowledge and managerial skills such as
leading, organizing and evaluating. The nurse management has to organize everything right

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from the use of personnel, equipments, clinical knowledge, skills and supplies to give care to
the patient in a varying environment. The nurse manager has to work as an information
system, which interprets and transmits the information to and from the employees and the
management. The nursing management works to tie the every aspect of the healthcare system
(Cowden, & Cummings, 2012).
The NSW department of health had pointed out three different key requirements of
the nurse unit manager. The first requirement is the leadership quality, as the nurse unit
manager has to lead and direct her team in the ward. The second requirement from a nurse
manager is to inspire the others in her team. The third requirement is to maintain a good and
safe work environment for the patients, the family members of the patients and the staffs as
well (NSW, 2010).
Leadership is a complex and versatile process that includes every aspect including
providing support, motivation, coordinating the resources to enable the team to attain the
collective objective. Experts indentify clinical leadership as a key driver of healthcare
service, as the leaders have to improve the quality of healthcare by engaging the patients and
clinicians in the reform process. The nurses and midwives works as the intermediary between
the doctors and patients (Wong, Cummings, & Ducharme, 2013).
The unit level clinical leadership focus on to the integration of leadership with clinical
expertise. The clinical leadership includes monitoring and delivering the evidence and
evaluating the treatment outcomes within a framework of continuous events of
improvements. The clinical leader will also assess the works and mitigate the risks of every
patient present in the organization and will improve the coordination and efficiency for the
wellbeing of patients. The clinical leaders also have to facilitate communication and
collaborate with the patients within the team, because of this; they can recognize the gap in

3OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
patient’s care as well as the concerned systematic issues. The clinical leader can find the
problems and implement the necessary solution after collaborating with management and the
professionals.
Clinical leadership is necessary to inform the direction of the healthcare system as it
involves the execution of goal-driven works, which improves a patient’s health status. The
leader has to motivate and coordinate the team, patient and families to promote the wellbeing
of the patient. The leader has to possess the quality of communication and has to be
influential enough to lead others towards the goal. However, the clinical leadership qualities
of a nurse is often misunderstood and ignored.
There is a global crisis of nurse leadership. The healthcare system of every country
faces many challenges including the workforce development and reduced funding for
healthcare. The executive nurse leaders have an important role to play, as they have to
provide the professional leadership to the other nurse manager and nurse leaders throughout
the clinic and to the other nursing stuff of the clinic as well. The executive nurse leaders’
works by setting the tone of caregiving within the hospital and makes sure that all the units
are working with sufficient resources and workforce they need. The executive nurse leader
also makes sure that the units are working in a positive environment and deliver quality care
to all the patients (Manary, 2013)
The patient’s safety and quality of care depends on the work environment. The nurses
have to apply their skills, experience and knowledge to meet the needs of various patients. If
the care fell short of the patient’s requirement, the nurses are there to shoulder the
responsibility. This helps reflecting the misunderstanding of the bigger effects of the complex
healthcare system as well as the complexity of the work environment. If the clinical leaders
make the unit nurses understand the complexity of the work environment and makes some

4OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
strategies to improve the outcome, the caregiving process of the nurses would be safer and
have higher quality (Billings, & Halstead, 2015).
The caregiving environment includes many complex factors such as the disease, the
technologies, used, clinicians, policies, procedures and resources. All these complex factors
interact with each other gives harmful and unanticipated errors. The nurse managers have to
apply the critical theory to keep her managerial qualities better. To make the safety culture of
the hospital a better option, the nurse manager will have to make use of her knowledge and
managerial skills in leading, planning, organizing, and evaluating (Stuart, 2014). According
to the general system theory, the safety culture also depends on the other persons of the
hospital like the housekeeper and social workers, which increases the complexity of the
overall caregiving services.
The health policy makers should definitely include a nurse leader as she can work as
the powerful force in shaping of the policy. To be influential, the nurses must have to acquire
the leadership qualities and see themselves as people with the capability to influence the
current and future healthcare delivery system. If the healthcare legislative agencies include
the nurse leaders in their health policy advisory body, they can bring their years of experience
as a nurse to the policy to make the healthcare policy better for the patients (Daly et al, 2014).
The nurses have a broad knowledge base about the aspects, such as political, economic and
social understanding as well as they knows about the patients’ problems. The nurse leaders
are also able to understand the challenges of the financial, cultural and social barriers the
people come across in the healthcare sector (Ningrum, 2017).
Their professional experience makes them understand the relationships and roles of
the different healthcare groups providing service in the country. As the nurses have a broad
knowledge of all these facts, they can advocate for the strategic development for nursing and

5OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
as well as for the bigger health workforce. The nurse leaders are considered as valuable
resources and have the ability to maintain effective, efficient and responsive healthcare
system.

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References:
Billings, D. M., & Halstead, J. A. (2015). Teaching in Nursing-E-Book: A Guide for Faculty.
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theoretical model of clinical nurses’ intentions to stay in their current
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Daly, J., Jackson, D., Mannix, J., Davidson, P., & Hutchinson, M. (2014). The importance of
clinical leadership in the hospital setting. Journal of Healthcare Leadership.
Giltinane, C. L. (2013). Leadership styles and theories. Nursing Standard, 27(41), 35-39.
Huber, D. (2013). Leadership and nursing care management. Elsevier Health Sciences.
Manary, M. P., Boulding, W., Staelin, R., & Glickman, S. W. (2013). The patient experience
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Northouse, P. G. (2015). Leadership: Theory and practice. Sage publications.
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http://www.health.nsw.gov.au/nursing/projects/Documents/updated-conceptual.pdf
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7OVERALL ANALYSIS OF LEADERSHIP IN NURSING
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