Leadership and Management in Nursing: Communication Skills, Mentoring, and Challenges with Electronic Health Records

Bachelor of Nursing

Leadership and management:
Leadership skills: Communication skills is one of the most important aspects of the nursing
leadership. Effective communication skills empower nurses to relate effectively with other
healthcare professionals and patients. Studies demonstrated that effective communication
skills are necessary for better patient outcome. Communication skills comprise of different
activities such as public speaking, presenting, listening and writing which are beneficial in
gaining trust from patients and other healthcare professionals. Communication can deliver
both positive message such as praise for good work by the subordinate or negative message
such as deteriorating condition of the patient. Hence, nurse leader should use communication
skills effectively to deliver both positive and negative messages. Registered nurses should
interact with leaders from other departments of the hospital for advocating the oversight of
the department and playing significant role in decision-making (Villarruel, 2017). Listening
is the most important aspect of communication. Registered nurse should have good listening
ability which would be helpful in demonstrating receptive capability of team leader. Effective
communication is beneficial way for communication of healthcare policies, team building
and collecting feedback. It is essential for the registered nurses to establish interpersonal
relationship with patients. Hence, one-to-one communication is an important component of
communication of registered nurses (Ennis, Happell, Broadbent, and Reid-Searl, 2013).
Mentoring is another important leadership skill which need to be developed in registered
nurses. Registered nurses as mentors should develop skills, maximise potential, and improve
performance of team members. Registered nurse as mentor should be approachable because
most of the student nurses and junior nurses are anxious about their journey as a nursing
professional (Hafsteinsdóttir, van der Zwaag, Schuurmans, 2017). Registered nurse as a
mentor should be capable of mentoring in practice area and clinical skills. Registered nurse as
a mentor should be calm because teaching-learning process can be more effective in clam
environment in comparison to the stressed environment. Confidence of nurse being a mentor
usually has major impact on junior nurses because junior mentors like confident mentors.
Confident nurse mentors can transmit their nursing practice and decision-making skills
effectively to the junior nurses. All the registered nurses as mentors should be passionate
about their practice and knowledge sharing (Scott and Miles, 2013).
Reflection on leadership skills: I would like to develop two leadership skills such as
professionalism and emotional intelligence to improve my nursing practice and leadership
role.

I would like improve my professionalism skills because nursing is a dynamic profession
which necessitate competent and confident leadership. Leaders represent the organisation at
every professional point of contact which reflect professional dynamics of the organisation.
Acquiring professionalism skills would be helpful for me to develop new nursing talent for
the next generation. Professionalism skills would be helpful for me in establishing link
between the nurses and management. Improvement in the professionalism skill in me would
make way to bring a positive and realistic attitude to every shift, take time to listen to
patients, care about appearance, assist patients and co-workers, make accountable for every
actions, keep nursing knowledge up-to-date and follow strong ethical practices when making
nursing decisions (Pidgeon, 2017). Ethical dilemmas are very common in nursing profession.
Professionalism would be effective in addressing ethical dilemmas in the nursing profession.
Nurse as leader should be accountable for all the activities. Professionalism would make
nurse leader to understand and act accordingly with respect to facility, organisational and
Government rules (Flanagan, Cortese-Rubino, and Fick, 2014).
I would like to improve my emotional intelligence because I don’t wish to lose control over
my emotions in front of other staff members and patients. I wish to develop and improve
upon emotional intelligence because I understood that emotional intelligence is more
important in comparison to the intelligence for nurse leaders. I wish to improve in terms of
different aspects such as self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness and relationship
management which can be effectively improved through improvement in the emotional
intelligence (Heckemann, Schols, and Halfens, 2015). It is important for me to improve my
emotional intelligence because it would be helpful in developing dynamism in me. Moreover,
it is evident that emotional intelligence leadership style proved beneficial in different clinical
departments of the hospital (Abraham and Scaria, 2017).
Communication and Health Informatics:
Challenges with electronic health records (EHR): Chosen service area is aged care. Upon
admission to the aged care facilities, patients give access to the nurses and other healthcare
professionals to access their medical records. In recent past, electronic health records (EHR)
plays significant role in maintaining patient related information. Maintenance of EHR results
in the nurse burnout due to burdensome user interface. Hence, it would be difficult for the
nurses to give adequate time for aged patients (Qian, Yu, and Hailey, 2015). Moreover,
nurses might assign work of medical records task to other colleagues. It might hamper the