Research Proposal - (Assignment)

Running head:RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Research Proposal
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

RESEARCH PROPOSAL1
Indicative Review of Literature
Keywords
The keywords to be used for the purpose of the literature search would be –
Transformational Leadership, Medicine Optimisation, Care Homes, Pharmacy, Healthcare,
Transformational leadership+medicine optimisation, Transformational leadership+healthcare.
Literature Search Strategy
An extensive literature search would be conducted over the course of multiple days.
The databases that will be used for this purpose are as follows-
 CINAHL (Current Nursing and Allied Health Research)
 MEDLINE (Via the use of PubMed)
 Cochrane Library
 ProQuest
The search is going to be focused on these databases as these are considered to be the best
databases for searching the nursing information and studies. CINAHL is considered to be an
excellent source to be searching for systematic reviews related to nursing (Wright, Golder
and Lewis-Light 2015). Cochrane is considered to be a reliable source to search for nursing
evidence and systematic reviews as well (Kicinski, Springate and Kontopantelis 2015).
MEDLINE is also considered to be a good source for biomedical information as well (Karaa
et al. 2016). ProQuest is one of the best databases to find studies relating to social sciences.
An important reason behind using these databases, in particular, is that Cochrane Library and
Medline are already free databases, and ProQuest and CINAHL has a subscription-based cost
which is already available to the researchers.

RESEARCH PROPOSAL2
Any current study or review relevant to the topic is selected, that is any paper
published in 2014 or later is considered. The keywords will be searched multiple times in
each of the databases and all the relevant papers will be rounded up. After rounding up the
papers from the databases, another search will be conducted on the bibliographic search
engine Google Scholar in search of good studies. If any good quality studies or papers are
located apart from those that have already been rounded up, they will be included in the
literature review.
Any paper published before 2014 will not be considered. Any paper where the
information is not clearly extractable or for which the full paper could not be obtained was
excluded from the literature review.
Each paper will be examined thoroughly and notes will be taken. The citations,
authors and year of publication will be kept track of.
Key Themes
By examining multiple studies, it has been seen that implementing the process of
transformational leadership in the medical field, the experience has generally been positive
for both the leader as well as the followers (Fischer 2016). In general, it resulted in a better
organisation of the work. The nurses were sure of what to do and how to approach a problem
in a better way. Even though there was no direct evidence of the effect of transformational
leadership on the satisfaction in the job environment, it was said to create a more positive
work environment definitely and enabled the nurses to become more focused on the patients
as the common aim was to provide good quality medical care to them. This resulted in better
patient outcomes in general. This probably had a positive effect on many medical staff who
were more motivated to learn and give better patient care (Brewer et al. 2016). In a cross-
sectional study conducted at primary care facilities in the United States, it was said that in

RESEARCH PROPOSAL3
most organisations, the nurse did not share proper or needed information among all the
members of the team. This, in turn, hampered the team mindset, which resulted in a less than
ideal work environment and less knowledge. In the facilities where the nurse leaders applied
transformational leadership, the medical staff had a better work environment in general
(Poghosyan and Bernhardt 2018). They were also prone to asking more questions which
made them more knowledgable in terms of medications. It was seen that clinics led by nurses
who applied transformational leadership had better patient outcomes (Gousy and Green
2015).
In the field of medicine, the need for a strong leader is very obvious. It was seen that
facilities having strong leadership framework resulted in better patient safety (Saravo, Netzel
and Kiesewetter 2017). Patient safety is related to many aspects that include administration of
proper medicine, providing of personalised care to each patient by the nurses and other
factors that directly related to an efficient nursing leader (Ammouri et al. 2015. It has been
seen that an efficient nursing leader, especially one who implements the principles of
transformational leadership properly, indirectly affects the level of job satisfaction for a
nurse. Better job satisfaction and motivation of the medical staff have a very obvious level of
influence on the patient outcomes and patient safety (Boamah et al. 2018). Effective
leadership is indispensable in relation to patient safety (Murray, Sundin, and Cope 2018).
On the other hand, patient safety is largely related to the proper prescription of
medicine. Giving medicine is the most common type of medical intervention and thus the
medicine that has been prescribed must be the correct one. Over-prescription of medicine is a
very common problem in many facilities mainly due to ‘defensive medicine’ (He 2014) or
over-diagnosis (Braithwaite 2014). Medicine optimisation is a recent concept that is based on
the idea that medicine should be prescribed on evidence-based information and only those
that are needed by the patient should be given (Shah, Lehman and Richardson 2014). This is