Transition to Practice: Shared Governance, Clinical Governance, and Self-Governance in Nursing

Running head: TRANSITION TO PRACTICE
TRANSITION TO PRACTICE
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TRANSITION TO PRACTICE
Shared governance:
Shared governance can be defined as the working model of participatory decision
making. Here, the nursing professionals are organized for making decisions about different
standards for clinical practice as well as quality improvement, professional as well as staff
development as well as research. Studies suggest four important principles of shared
governance in profession of nursing (O’Malley 2017). These are equality where shared as well
as equal focus needs to be provided on patients, staffs as well as services for providing safe and
effective care. The second one is empowerment where authority as well as autonomy is
important for making decisions about nursing practices. The third principle is accountability
where nurses need to ensure willingness and responsibility for investing in ethical practices
through shared decision making. The fourth one is partnership where nurses need to provide
importance on teamwork and collaboration among the caregivers and between patient/families
and caregivers.
Effective communication and interpersonal skills are extremely important for nurses not
only to develop therapeutic relationship with patients but also to ensure strong teamwork within
the healthcare teams. While working within a multi-disciplinary healthcare teams, I need to
interact with different healthcare professionals who are caring for different aspects of a particular
patients. Effective communication is extremely important between the members so that all the
needs and requirements of the patients are identified and effective collaborative care planning is
developed that aligns with the requirements of patients (Kutney et al. 2016). Strong interpersonal
skills would help me to develop rapport with the other members and thereby work in harmony to
meet the patient goals. Development of mutual trust and respect among the members help in
ensuring safe care delivery services without occurrence any miscommunication, medication

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TRANSITION TO PRACTICE
errors, omissions of services, overlapping of care timing by each professional and many others
(Fisher et al. 2016). Constructive feedback through effective communication and interpersonal
skills can help in effective teamwork. I have learnt from my experience that while caring for
stroke patients in the rehabilitation center, physicians, nurses, dieticians, occupational therapists,
physiotherapist, speech therapists and many others need to work as effective team members
ensuring shared governance through communication and effective interpersonal skills.
Clinical governance:
Clinical governance can be described as the system through which healthcare
organizations as well as the healthcare professionals are accountable for improving the quality of
their services continuously. They need to safeguard high standards of care service for their
patients and create an environment in which excellence in clinical care would get the scope to
flourish extensively. Many of the studies refer clinical governance as the umbrella term. This
concept is seen to cover different types of activities that help in sustaining as well as improving
high standards of patient care (Van Zwanenberg et al. 2018). Nurses need to constantly upgrade
their skills and knowledge to ensure quality and safe care to patients ensuring patient
satisfaction.
One of the way by which nurses can ensure clinical governance is by practicing in
reflective practices. Reflections help nurses in gaining various valuable insights from their daily
experiences in the healthcare wards while caring for patients who may be both positive and
negative. Studies opine that reflective practices would help nurses to identify their strengths and
weakness along with the areas in practice where they would need to develop more skills and
knowledge (Kensing et al., 2017). It would help me to develop an idea about how my nursing