Nursing Leadership: Effective Communication in Intensive Care Units

This essay delves into the crucial role of effective communication within nursing leadership, emphasizing its impact on patient care and overall healthcare outcomes. The essay begins by defining leadership and highlighting the significance of nurses as core members of the healthcare team, underscoring their role in building relationships with patients, families, and other healthcare professionals. It then explores various leadership styles, focusing on effective communication as a key leadership topic and skill. The essay discusses the advantages of good communication, including personalized care, improved patient outcomes, and the ability to meet patients' needs. It outlines essential communication skills such as active listening, nonverbal communication, and cultural awareness, and examines how these skills apply in different nursing roles, including bedside nursing, public health, and unit management. Furthermore, the essay incorporates a personal reflection from an ICU head nurse, detailing the application of effective communication in critical situations, personal strengths and weaknesses in communication, and opportunities for improvement. Finally, the essay emphasizes the importance of professionalism, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence as essential traits for successful nursing leaders.

Running Head: NURSING-FRONTRUNNERS
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Nursing Leadership
Essay
student
6/11/2019

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Nursing Leadership
Leadership means listening, encouraging, being focused and maintaining the rewarding
culture. Leadership is what can make a healthy workplace and also cause different issues among
professionals like nurse managers, new nurses and patients and physician. Nurses are the core
member of any healthcare team as they spend more time with the patient than any other
healthcare providers (Dyess, Sherman, Pratt, & Chiang-Hanisko, 2016). They play a role in
developing a healthy relationship with the patient and family and other health workers. Therefore
they must develop different skills in their practice such as effective leadership quality. Nurse
leaders should become a role model for other nurses and earn their status. Five most commonly
used leadership style in nursing are autocratic leadership, laizzez-faire leadership, democratic
leadership, transformational leaders, and servant leadership. Each leadership style has a key role
in nursing practice such as making the environment healthy and safe for the patient and staffs
and leading other nurses (Lin, MacLennan, Hunt, & Cox, 2015). In this particular essay, one of
the leadership topics will be discussed. Its role in nursing practice will also be mentioned.
There is a number of leadership topics that should be applied in nursing practice, some of
them are a culture of safety and quality, nursing code of ethics, communication, team building,
critical thinking, empowering other and execution (Stanley, 2016). Communication is the most
essential nursing leadership topic helps nurses to develop a healthy relationship with patients and
staffs in healthcare practice and communities. Good communication among nurses and staff and
diseased persons has many advantages. Primarily, it greatly subsidizes to the capability to deliver
patients with personalized care. Nurses leaders who takings the time to apprehend the distinctive
challenges and anxieties of their patients might be better ready to recommend on their behalf and
correctly deal with the problems as they recognized. This better emphasis on communication

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commonly results in healthier patient outcomes additionally. Additionally, patients who sense
like they are getting all of the nurse’s consideration throughout an interaction are additional
likely to reveal the factual degree of their feelings and indications much earlier. Fellow nurses
become more comfortable and less hesitant throughout their learning process (Weiss, Tappen, &
Grimley, 2019). Lastly, effective communication can gratify the distinctive requirements of the
patient as defined in the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs such as feelings of security, love and self-
assurance, all of which are significant throughout a patient’s disease management and retrieval.
Effective communications ultimately help nurses to develop therapeutic communication with the
patients and their family (Yu, & Ko, 2017).
Nurses are actually critical when it comes to provide essential health facilities and bring
the person-centred care to the communities. For that nurses must include effective
communication skills in their practice (Foronda, MacWilliams, & McArthur, 2016). Using
communication skills is not a new concept for the nurses, it has been used by nurses for the last
many years but nowadays it has become essential for nurses to learn this skill. Some of the major
concepts or skills of effective communication are nonverbal communication, active listening,
personal relationship, inspire trust, show compassion, cultural awareness, educating patients,
written communication, being empathetic while communicating with the patient, make eye
contact and presentation skills ( Sprangers, Dijkstra, & Romijn-Luijten, 2015). Nursing leaders
must learn these concepts in order to develop effective communication with the patients and
staff. Active listening will allow the patient to realize that you are actually interested in what
they are discussing. It also helps in the healthier discussion of the patient's case and other issues
with the other healthcare providers. Nonverbal communication helps to send a strong message in
situations where verbal communication is ineffective. Nonverbal communication includes

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appropriate body language, making, hand moments, shaking heads, body posture, and smiling.
Written communication is essential to share the actual information to the patient and physician
(Lee, Mast, Humbert, Bagnardi, & Richards, 2016).
Effective communication is also essential in different nursing roles including bedside
nursing, public health nurses, and unit manager. Bedside nurses have to be available for patients
to comprehend their sickness, how that disease impacts the patient’s life, and what are the
obstacles of the disease management (Dithole, Thupayagale-Tshweneagae, Akpor, & Moleki,
2017). That is where effective communication takes place as it can help them to assess the
patient more effectively and easily. Once the therapeutic relationship between the bedside nurse
and patient, the diseased person is more comfortable in discussing their actual situation and what
they are feeling. Public health nurses are the one who delivers their healthcare services to the
community or population, they reach to people instead of waiting for them to come in the health
care setting. Effective communication can help them to educate people about health concerns,
and how they can access the health services provided by different health organizations (Adams,
Mannix, & Harrington, 2017). Effective communication allows nurses to make a favourable
relationship with the local health providers in order to engage more people in health care
programs. Effective communication skills can help in making a healthier relationship with the
health care companies and involve more stakeholders in the program initiated for the specific
community or society. Unit nurse managers are responsible for leading nursing staff in the
specific department or unit. They must observe the care being provided to the patients; perform
management tasks, and making the decision about the budget (Thomson, Outram, Gilligan, &
Levett-Jones, 2015). They have to deal with the number of people in the healthcare setting.
Effective communication skills can help them to address queries of the new nurses. Effective

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communication will help them to involve other healthcare providers in the decision-making
process and listen to their suggestions and complaints. The unit manager is the representative of
the community, therefore, they must be more skilled and preventative, therefore they must
implement effective communication in their practice (Clements, Curtis, Horvat, & Shaban,
2015).
I have been working mostly in intensive care units or emergency wards as they head
nurse, where I had to deal with a number of critical cases that needed immediate response and
provide my service by collaborating with other nurses. In intensive care using you have very less
time to guide others and discuss more what to do, and how to deal with the adverse situation.
Effective communication is what helped me a lot to guide my colleague nurses in very less time.
Nurses who are newly appointed in the department are sometimes feeling nervousness as they
have to deal with situations they have not seen very must. My effective communication helped in
encouraging them to perform their task without any hesitation. In the intensive care unit (ICU)
setting, the patients and their relatives have cited expert communication as an essential
component of high-quality upkeep. Expertise in this subject improves my knowledge of the
diseased person and family’s meet with wellbeing care and delivers a vehicle to collect
information, notify, demonstrate, and offer emotional care. It helped me in identifying the values,
objectives, preferences of healthcare, anxieties, and concerns.
Evaluation of my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats will help me to
understand what skills I have and where I should work to enhance my skills for the advancement
of my career. Some of the strengths I have in relation to effective communication include active
listening, and I make eye contact while communicating with the patient that helped in assessing

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the patient more effectively. I know that Communication is not just about making eye contact
and active listening, its complete practice that needs efforts of nurses to make a healthy
relationship with the patient. Some of the weaknesses that I need to work on our lack of cultural
awareness and advocating patients when it comes to the end of life care. There are more
experiences nurses in my unit who are well aware of different cultures and provided their
services to people belongs to multiple cultures. This can be a great opportunity for me to learn
from them and learn to advise people more effectively. They are more skilled in communication
skills than me, so I can discuss with them about how to develop my communicating skills.
Although there are some threats that may stop me from developing these skills such as most of
the experienced nurses are not very interactive, and talk very less to other nurses. As ICU head
nurse I have to address more issues in the department, so I do not have much time to learn about
different cultures, advocating techniques and more nonverbal communication.
In my opinion, nursing is a diverse field and the nurse leaders must learn multiple skills
and traits in order to become a successful nursing leader. Professionalism is the first traits that
must be learned by every nurse. I think Nursing is an active occupation that needs competent,
self-confident leadership. As administrative leaders, these specialists symbolize the nursing field
at closely every specialized point of interaction within the health care setting. The second trait is
critical thinking; Nurse Frontrunners guide inexperienced healthcare providers in the application
of critical thinking to grow their decision-making abilities based on the multifaceted array of
aspects. This specific skill is vigorous in a health care setting with cumulative examples of
multidisciplinary teamwork. The increasing tendency of autonomy for all the nurses similarly
makes this trait a valuable specialized skill for nurse leader. The last trait is emotional
intelligence; in medical settings, nurse front-runners work diligently with apprentices to assist

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them grows emotional intelligence. I think such provision benefits peers to handle the stressors
that contemporary during routine encounters. Nurse leaders support learners in dealing with
those challenges that can lead to emotional collapse and poor team teamwork.
Nurse leader is responsible for guiding other nurses to perform their clinical task and help
them to enhance their skills in order to provide high-quality care to the patient. Nursing leaders
must learn multiple skills and leadership topics to enhance advance their career. One of the
leadership topics is effective communication. Effective communication is essential for nurse
leader in order to develop a therapeutic relationship with the patient, to assess the patient easily,
to identify the actual cause of health issues and involving them in the decision making prices. It
also helps in making a good relationship with other professionals in the healthcare setting and
guiding new nurses to perform nursing practice in the department. Being an intensive care unit
nurses head it is more essential for me to have such skills to advance my career. Effective
communications skills helped me provide instant services to the people admitted in ICU by short
and effective decision with the new nurses and patient family members. The analysis of my
communications identifies that my strength is active listening, my weakness is lack of knowledge
about cultures, opportunity my department is having experiences nurses who have knowledge of
different culture, and threat here is that they are less interactive with other nurses.

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References
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