Nursing Assignment 1: Reflective Report on Leadership in Nursing

This nursing assignment is a reflective report that explores the student's personal understanding and development of leadership skills, emotional intelligence, cultural diversity, decision-making, communication, prioritization, and change management gained from a leadership and management module. The student uses Bortons' framework to reflect on their experiences, including challenges in cross-cultural communication, handling patient deaths, and the need for emotional resilience. The assignment highlights the importance of situational leadership, emotional intelligence for better patient satisfaction, and the role of cultural awareness in delivering high-quality care. It also emphasizes the significance of effective communication, ethical decision-making, time management, and adapting to changes in the nursing profession. An action plan is developed using the SMART approach, focusing on improving verbal and nonverbal skills, collaboration, participation in emergency care, leadership, and critical reflection to manage job burnout. The student aims to enhance their ability to understand patient concerns, respect cultural diversity, and collaborate effectively within the interdisciplinary team.

Running Head: Nursing assignment
Nursing assignment
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction
The aim of the assignment is to describe personal understanding after attending and
participating in the module including Emotional intelligence, leadership, Culture diversity,
Decision making, communication, Prioritization, and change. In response to the learning gained
from the module, an action plan on implementing this learning is developed. The experience is
described using the Bortons' (1970) Framework Guiding Reflective Activities.
Reflection
I have attended the l&M program with the objective of learning the leadership skills. I
wanted to gain insights into the cultural diversity. Since healthcare sector, includes the diversity
due to patients visiting from diverse cultural and linguistic background, learning skills to manage
patients in peak hours is necessary. During several instances, I failed to address patient’s queries
due to lack of cross-cultural communication skills. I was unable to handle my first experience of
patient’s death in an emergency room as the charge nurse. I lacked the emotional resilience.
Therefore, I decided to develop nursing leadership skills and professional competencies such as
quick decision-making in the critical situation, respecting diversity and ways to prioritise nursing
responsibilities.
In this experience, the best thing I have learnt is the different leadership theories, and the
most effective one as I perceive is the situational leadership theory. According to McCleskey,
(2014), this theory emphasise on using the leadership style that most suits the situation, instead
of adopting and learning only one style of leadership. I agree because in nursing practice it is
critical to predicting as to what would be the next clinical situation in intensive care unit.

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Experiences of patient death are inevitable in the nursing profession. Patients suffer chronic
illnesses and experience patient-centred care. Emotional intelligence is essential for better patient
satisfaction and model the behaviour that is expected from healthcare staff. With the help of
emotional intelligence, a nurse can better reason using emotions, correctly identify emotions in
self and others, understand and manage other emotions during emotional situations such as
sudden death due to stroke. Emotional intelligence skills are essential for transforming
challenged in teamwork and patient care (Aradilla-Herrero et al., 2014).
Learning about cultural diversity made it clear that it gives several opportunities to
deliver high quality care. For instance, taking patient history or health assessment can be easy
when the nursing workforce reflects the patient’s communication styles, demographics and
culture awareness (Mareno & Hart, 2014). It will help patients feel comfortable. Else, it will
require the use of medical interpreter even for petty issues. Thus, cross-cultural communications
skills are required to accepts the individual differences and adapt different skills from co-
workers. Communication learning is not only to maintain diversity but also to collaborate with
the interdisciplinary team. Good communication skills both verbal and non-verbal better help to
understand the patient's feelings with empathy. According to Crystal & Crystal (2016) better
nurse-patient communication help, establish the therapeutic relationship. It is more likely to
promote patient’s participation in care. Nursing practice involves ethical issues, and hence
clinical decision should be made effectively. Training on decision-making is essential to be able
to decide on best intervention among others. To guide the decision-making, critical thinking is
necessary to handle the dynamic situation. Decision-making skills had better help in prioritizing
the care by unfolding the clinical situation. I have learned the value of the time management and
prioritization of the patient needs. Constant reassessment of the situation is necessary (Johnsen

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et al., 2016). For instance, cleanliness is less important than maintaining the patient’ airways.
Adapting to change in the dynamic nursing profession will help play roles that are more
complex. Overall, this module was effective in teaching the way to professional development.
Therefore, my action plan is to put this learning into practice. Using the SMART
approach that refers to Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time goals (Jung et al.,
2015), I have developed a SMART plan for myself. I want to improve the following skills in
next three months-
 Verbal skills
 Nonverbal skills- to deal with patients with disability
 Collaborative skills- to collaborate with interdisciplinary team - greater
engagement with nurses and co-worker while decision-making
 Greater participation in emergency care services- As it involves decision-making
and practice prioritisation
 Take initiatives to mentor and lead my juniors- to implement leadership skills
 Engage in feedback session- take feedback from peers, nurse mentor, mangers
and preceptors on improvement of my skills- thrice in a month to evaluate the
improvement
 Attend two workshops by the end of the year on cross-cultural communication- to
adjust to diversity
 Engage in critical reflection to deal with job burnout, stress in emergency room
by thinking alternate means to highest quality of patient comfort and care (Nicol
& Dosser, 2016)

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In future, my action plan will demonstrate the better understanding of patient's concerns,
respect cultural diversity, better response to death and die and collaborate with the
interdisciplinary team.

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References
Aradilla-Herrero, A., Tomás-Sábado, J., & Gómez-Benito, J. (2014). Associations between
emotional intelligence, depression and suicide risk in nursing students. Nurse Education
Today, 34(4), 520-525.
Crystal, B. S. N., & Crystal, E. (2016). Improving Nurse-Patient Verbal and Non-Verbal
Communication Skills: ICU Patients with Neurological Communication Impairments.
Johnsen, H. M., Fossum, M., Vivekananda-Schmidt, P., Fruhling, A., & Slettebø, Å. (2016).
Teaching clinical reasoning and decision-making skills to nursing students: design,
development, and usability evaluation of a serious game. International journal of medical
informatics, 94, 39-48.
Jung, H., Yoo, H., Lee, Y., & Chung, K. Y. (2015). Interactive pain nursing intervention system
for smart health service. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 74(7), 2449-2466.
Mareno, N., & Hart, P. L. (2014). Cultural competency among nurses with undergraduate and
graduate degrees: Implications for nursing education. Nursing Education
Perspectives, 35(2), 83-88.
McCleskey, J. A. (2014). Situational, transformational, and transactional leadership and
leadership development. Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, 5(4), 117.
Nicol, J. S., & Dosser, I. (2016). Understanding reflective practice. Nursing Standard, 30(36),
34-42.