Definition of Leadership and Patients Safety

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Introduction
Nurses are one of the most important people of a healthcare organization. They are
responsible for taking care of the patients all the time from observing, monitoring, and
controlling to administering medicines and during emergencies. In short, it can be said that
nurses need to wear multiple hats while working in the healthcare organizations and
hospitals. Therefore, the profession is quite difficult and it requires a variety of skills and
competencies to provide the best quality care (Sfantou et al., 2017). The prime task of the
nurses is to promote patients’ safety and in this regard they follow specific standards and
skills to enhance the care experience of the patients. Leadership style is one of the important
skills that nurses acquire. In this paper, the relation between leadership and patients’ safety
will be discussed along with their individual definitions. Simultaneously, the paper will
provide a clear discussion on two different leadership styles and its efficacy to promote
patients’ safety. Finally, a critical analysis of leadership style for a specific situation will also
be performed followed by a brief conclusion.
Definition of leadership and patients’ safety
Leadership is basically an ability to do something with the help of proper talent and
skill which is adaptive and can motivate others. Leadership empowers, and a leader always
inspires and enhances self-esteem as well as confidence of others. It is all about solving
problems which reduces the gap between the things as desired and the things as perceived.
Nursing leadership is basically defined as a process of influencing others to improve the
quality of the care and ensures an environment where all the staffs are involved in their work
and motivated to provide a holistic care to all the patients (Phaneuf, Boudrias, Rousseau &
Brunelle, 2016). On the other hand, patients’ safety is all about reducing errors and adverse
effects associated with the treatment or care so that it can become more effective. Basically,

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patients’ safety is responsibility or discipline that emphasizes safety in healthcare. Patients’
safety is one of the major concerns of all the healthcare professionals from all over the world.
It can be achieved through proper prevention, reduction, reporting and analyzing any kind of
medical error that can harm the safety of the patients deteriorating the quality of care
(McFadden, Stock & Gowen III, 2015). In order to improve the healthcare outcome it is
important to maintain the safety of the patients.
Relation between these two
Safety of the patients is highly dependent on the performance of the nurses. In recent
days, both evidence-based nursing as well as medicine are widely recognized as the tool of
establishing holistic care that leads to high productivity of the healthcare organization.
Leadership has been defined as the relationship between the leader and the followers who
working on a same platform towards achieving a common goal together. In studies,
researchers indicated that leadership is critical for strengthening the quality and the
integration of care (Boamah, Laschinger, Wong & Clarke, 2018). In order to achieve high
productivity of a healthcare organization it is important to improve the quality of care.
Furthermore, several studies in this regard have also indicated the importance of leadership
style to enhance the quality of healthcare in nursing homes and others. It has been reported
that significant leadership style and optimum level of patient satisfaction can effectively
reduce the medication error and the other adverse effects of healthcare. In addition, some
studies discussed that empowering leadership is associated to patient outcomes and promotes
greater nursing expertise. There are many publications and studies which also clearly
mentioned that leadership style is a key element to improve quality of care. Nurses, who
understand the emerging science of complexity, will be better getting prepared to face
difficulties and they will also find creative ways to improve safe patient care. A survey result
revealed that healthcare leaders use complex principles and standards in the chaotic