Relationships between Leadership Styles and Patient Safety

This paper discusses the relationship between leadership styles and patient care. It critically analyses two leadership strategies and the impact of these two leadership strategies to promote patient safety. Medication safety as a specific patient safety issue will be analysed to illustrate this issue.

RUNNING HEAD: THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP
STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
The relationships between leadership styles and patient safety
Name of the Student:
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1THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
The leadership strategy has a relation to patient safety. To improve patient care and
patient safety, appropriate leadership has a significant role to play. This paper will discuss the
relationship between leadership strategy and patient care. After analysing the definition of
leadership and patient safety, this paper will critically analyse two leadership strategies and
the impact of these two leadership strategies to promote patient safety. Medication safety as a
specific patient safety issue will be analysed to illustrate this issue.
The leadership strategy is a significant part of the nursing sector. The idea of
leadership in nursing field has two roles, which are supervised and guide subordinate. The
leadership strategy in nursing sector motivates others to enhance the quality of care along
with the direct support in clinical care. A capable leadership strategy in nursing sector
encourages other nurses to perform in a better way to improve health care. Leadership
strategy in the nursing field has significance because it promotes best team-based nursing and
improves patient outcomes. Efficient leader delivers an environment, which makes the
subordinate nurses more passionate sand concerned about their duty and responsibility.
Patient safety means the avoidance of harm to patients. To accomplish a trustworthy health
care system, implying safety science methods is the aim of patient safety (Dekker, 2016). To
ensure patient safety, nurses are important because nurses monitor patients, detect error and
mistakes, and thoroughly examine the care procedures (Kwan, Sampson & Shojania, 2013).
Patient safety has several goals, which are identify the patients properly, develop fruitful
communication, develop the safety of medication, assure safe surgery, curtail the risk of
infection related to health care medicine, decreasing the harm of patient from falls (Graban,
2018).
There are several leadership strategies to imply patient safety and improve health
care. In this part, two leadership strategies, which are Transactional leadership and

2THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
Transformational leadership, will be analysed. According to the Transactional leadership
style, a team-based approach in nursing will yield desired results only when the role of each
member of the team is properly understood. The team needs to pay sufficient amount of
attention towards the duties that they need to fulfil right at that moment. Transactions
leadership style includes two important targets that should be met. One is the necessity to
focus on the urgent job that has been assigned and two, reach proper nursing quality (Frankel
& PGCMS, 2019). This style leadership in nursing sector is not new. Previously it had been
put to practice and also abandoned.
Nonetheless, this style still prevailed. The success of this style can be attributed to the
fact that it has delivered some satisfying results. To take this further, assistants will be
required not only from public and policymakers but also from each member of a team. The
benefit of shared leadership is that all members of the group are equally accountable for the
duties and fate of the team. In this transactional leadership style provides reward or penalty to
the employees according to their task. This leadership strategy focus on the supervision
procedure, leadership, performance of the team, and organisation. Nurses are motivated not
only by rewards but also by discipline. This leadership style in nursing field concentrates the
procedure, which should be done to maintain everything perfectly in the present. The leader,
who follows Transactional leadership style, concentrates on the mistakes made by the nurses
(Hayati, Charkhabi & Naami, 2014). This leadership style will be helpful to maintain a
specific manner in health care. Transactional leadership is oriented to problem solving, which
will help to decrease mistakes and enhance an evidence-based approach to health care
system. In this leadership style superior and the subordinate nurses motivate and influence
one another collectively so that each of them delivers their best performance. The relationship
between superior and subordinate nurses is based on public learning and social exchange
strategies. The reciprocal nature of Transactional leadership style helps the leader to motivate

3THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
the nurses. One other important leadership style is Transformational leadership style. This
leadership style motivates nurses to provide the best quality of work. The leadership style
helps the nurses to maintain positive mind setup while performing their duty. This leadership
style help to achieve common target and vision of the team (Ross et al., 2014). To develop a
productive and engaged team in health care, this leadership style will guide the leader. In the
health care system, an intelligent, smart, and inspiring nurse should be the leader, who can
guide other nurses to achieve the vision. There is also an interactive mode of the
Transformational leadership style (Fischer, 2016). In this manner of approach, all the
conventional norms of staff meeting are followed. The gathering helps in transferring
knowledge from one member to the other. However, this kind of practice can only bring in
success if the knowledge gathered in the meetings are put into practice. Although if we
consider the matter conceptually, several nurses should be part of the strategy, efforts should
also be made to involve medical practitioner.
Nursing as a profession and the nurses as a whole do enjoy a certain degree of respect.
But, they always need to have some backing from well-known physicians to win the public
favour and admiration. This again is possible through exchange of views. Using the
transformational leadership strategies, the nursing team should use the full scope of working
and also have access to a platform, where they can interchange their ideas with both the
public and the lawmakers. This leadership strategy helps the leader to achieve self-fulfilment
and the importance of change. Long term perspective, trust, greatness can be built through
this leadership style. The leader, who follows Transformational leadership, is strong on
psychological reasoning and focus on empowerment, creative thought process. Other nurses
can follow the transformational leader as a role model. The leader has to be charismatic,
visionaries, supportive to the nurses, extraverted, and create opportunity for the personal
development of the nurses (Giddens, 2018).

4THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
Transactional leadership style and Transformational leadership style can enhance the
health care system. To ensure the patient safety issue these two strategies can be beneficial.
Medication safety is an important issue of patient’s safety. To treat disease, improve
conditions of patient, medicines are used. Medicines are not only safe but also beneficial
when the medicines are used as prescribed by the doctor. Medication safety improved patient
safety by reducing medical error. Medication safety has five rights, which are the right
patient, appropriate drug, exact quantity of drug, the proper route, and the exact time. To
ensure medication safety there are few basic steps. Those steps are verifying any complete
medication order, cross-check the patient’s medical record from which the nurse can get idea
about the allergy, at a time focus on a specific patient and prepare exact quantity of
medication, provide necessary knowledge to the patients about the medicines, and strictly
follow the medication administration (Morello et al., 2013). Medication safety is preventing
the error at any part of medication use procedure. Transactional leadership style in nursing
motivates the subordinates to perform in a better way. The reward and penalty procedure of
the transactional leadership influence the nurses to perform better (Mah'd, Almatari &
Almukhtar, 2014). Patient safety is enhanced through this leadership style because nurses are
focused on curtailing medication errors to improve their performance (Lawton et al., 2014).
Transformational leadership style helps the nurse to enhance the creativity,
motivation, ethical behaviour, health care ability, patience, team management procedure. The
Transformational leadership style needs close collaboration of the leader, policy-makers, and
nurses. There are four components of Transformational leadership style related to medication
safety. Those four elements are idealised inspiration, inspirational encouragement,
intellectual stimulation, and consideration of individual. According to the Transformational
leadership style, the leader will influence the nurses to perform in a way, which enhance
medication safety. The learning about medication safety must be applied by the nurses, and

5THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
the leader will encourage them to follow their medication safety learning. The leader will
evaluate the environment of work place and patient safety system. According to the situation
the leader will guide the nurses to maintain medication safety. Medication safety needed to
develop a better patient safety system. The patient will get benefit from the patient safety
which will curtail the medication error.
Therefore, in conclusion it can be said that Transactional leadership and
Transformational leadership style can enhance patient safety. These two leadership strategies
can encourage nurses to perform in a better way. To assure medication safety the leader can
follow these two leadership styles.

6THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
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7THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP STYLES AND PATIENT SAFETY
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