Leadership in Mental Health Nursing

Running head: LEADERSHIP IN MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
LEADERSHIP IN MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

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LEADERSHIP IN MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
Introduction:
An effective leader has a distinct set of personal qualities that help him to lead, guide and
mentor a team of subordinates in ways by which they can reach their potential and achieve the
mission and the vision set by the organizations (Fischre 2016). Studies opine that effective
leaders in the health services can emphasize continually that safe, high quality, compassionate
care is provided to all service users. They ensure that the voice of the service users are heard and
patient experience, concerns, needs and feedback (positive and negative) are also attended
consistently. In this assignment, importance of leadership in mental health nursing would be
discussed by analyzing real-life case situation to shed more light on different aspects of
successful leadership.
Brief overview of the situation:
About 15 novice student nurses had been placed in the mental health inpatient ward after
they had had graduated from Xyz Nursing university. The new nurses were allocated their own
tasks my the nurse managers who had to manage the general medical-surgical nursing ward and
were found to get less time for attending to the needs of the new nurses. However, several
complaints had been reported by the families of most of the patients as well as some patients
themselves stating that they were not provided quality care by the new nurses and that they are
quite upset. On reporting of the issue, the higher authority appointed Mrs. Ileana Gomes as the
nursing leader in order to lead the new nurses and help them provide the expected quality of care
services to the patients. The assignment would mainly depict a critical analysis of the different
nursing issues identified in the mental health ward and accordingly would also critically depict
how Mr. Gomes had applying appropriate transformational leadership style to ensure that ever

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LEADERSHIP IN MENTAL HEALTH NURSING
problems faced by the new nurses are overcome by them successfully to provide high quality
care to the patients.
Issue of improper communication skills of the nurses and how it was mitigated:
The new nurses who were appointed to the mental health ward were witnessed to possess
poor communication skills. They could not communicate with the patients in an efficient manner
for which the mental health patients were not found to be comfortable to get treatment in their
presence. One of the nurses was seen to break into the room of a mental health patient without
knocking and started providing her anti-depressant dose even without describing her intervention
or asking for permission. Another of the nurse was found to be fidgety in her appearance and
asked the patient to be faster in his replies so that she can move onto the next patient. Another of
the nurses was found to be exhibiting an insensitive behavior to the death of the son of the
depressed patient and told, “You should have controlled you son’s smoking habits, if you really
would have wanted to save him”. Several such incidences made Gomes understood that the
nursing professionals were not aware of the correct procedures of undertaking therapeutic
communication with the patients and for this reason they were not able to develop an emotional
connection with the patients. The patients were unsatisfied with the treatments and their families
complained about this.
Effective therapeutic relationship development is a significant attribute of mental
healthcare services provided by the nurses to the patients. Proper nonverbal communication like
empathy and compassion are considered to be two important attributes that makes the patients
feel respected (Vaismoradi et al., 2016). The patients feel that the nurses are not judging them
about their mental health condition and that they are able to feel the suffering that the patient is