The Impact of Nursing Leadership on Patient Safety Outcomes

This essay examines the critical role of nursing leadership in fostering a culture of patient safety within healthcare settings. It defines patient safety and emphasizes the importance of preventing medical errors and adverse events. The essay explores three primary leadership styles: transformational, authoritarian, and democratic, analyzing their impact on team dynamics, communication, and patient outcomes. It highlights how transformational and democratic leadership can improve communication, staff motivation, and the development of safe care strategies, while authoritarian leadership is criticized for its limitations. The essay uses a case study of a healthcare center receiving complaints about poor patient-staff communication to illustrate how transformational leadership can be applied to improve these issues. Ultimately, the essay argues that effective leadership is essential for creating supportive and empathetic healthcare environments that prioritize patient safety, satisfaction, and positive outcomes, while also reducing preventable deaths and hospital stays. The author references various studies to support the claims and provide a comprehensive overview of the topic.

Running head: NURSING LEADERSHIP IN PATIENT SAFETY
NURSING LEADERSHIP IN PATIENT SAFETY
Name of the student:
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NURSING LEADERSHIP IN PATIENT SAFETY
Patient safety can be defined as the significant feature that every health care centre
should provide as the core of service to mankind. It can be described as the disciple who
mainly helps in emphasizing a culture of safety in healthcare. This can be often achieved by
the steps of prevention, reduction as well as reporting and analysis of the different medical
errors which may lead to adverse effects (Cope & Murray, 2017). Not only medical errors,
the frequency as well as magnitude of any avoidable adverse events which may be
threatening to the lives of the patients should be prevented so that the patient does not have
excessive flow of finance and also does not have to stay for long days in hospitals.
Recognising any healthcare errors which might compromise quality of life for the patient
would harm the core principle of the culture of safety. Therefore it is the responsibility of the
healthcare professionals to be skilled and knowledgeable in such a way so that they can
provide the best quality care to the patients by maintaining a safe care and evidence based
plan of interventions (Lin et al., 2015). Often strong healthcare teams working in proper
collaboration with each other help in the reduction of the infection rates and also help in
putting checks in healthcare centres to prevent mistakes along with ensuring strong lines of
communication within different healthcare stakeholders like healthcare stags, patients and
their social circles (Foronda, Budhathoki & Salani, 2014). Most healthcare centres therefore
appoint individuals with strong leadership capabilities so that the healthcare stags can get
proper guidance in ensuring patients safety as the number one priority. A good leader with
the correct leadership attributes can build a team which will provide a care which is of the
best quality and achieve high level of patient satisfaction preventing dangerous complications
for patients, ensuring faster recovery and avoiding preventable death rate of patients.
Three different types of leadership which are seen in the healthcare sectors are
transformational leadership, authoritarian leadership and democratic leadership. In
transformational leadership, the behaviour of the leaders helps in transforming as well as

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inspiring the team mates which make them perform beyond the expectations at the same time
of transcending self interest for the better good of the organisation. Such leaders help the
team members to work beyond expectations as they help the team member put more effort as
usual. Such a team under this style of leadership never puts themselves in the first place but
performs whatever is best for the reputation of the organisation (Frankel et al., 2017). The
leaders provide a clear vision of the future which helps in motivating the staff members to
excel themselves. Old ideas and assumption are replaced with novel ideas under this type of
leadership that help in solving problems much easily (Tyczkowski et al., 2015). The second
form of leadership is the authoritarian leadership where the leader is the only one in power
who takes decisions and calls the shots on behalf of all the team members. These leaders take
decisions without consulting with the team members. The team members who do not perform
as been told or disagree with the leaders are given punishments. Authoritarian leaders often
take the example of a mistake done by a member and punished them in front of everyone to
teach all others. Even if the faulty processes are responsible for an error, the blame is always
given on individuals (McFadden, stock & Gowell, 2015). Democratic leadership may be
defined as the form of leadership where the leader encourages the team to speak up and join
any decisions making process along with intervening any discussion where they seem to
provide better outputs. This type of open communication helps the staffs to feel that they are
also significant in the organisations as their voices safe paid importance. Members are given
their own responsibilities and are also held accountable for their actions. They get feedbacks
on their performance form the leaders and accordingly they modify in order to improve
quality of the processes and systems rather than finding their mistakes.
Good leadership is one of the most essential ingredients in healthcare organisation
that contribute to create workplaces where members respect high quality and provide safe
interventions for patients. Strong benefits of good leadership in clinical practise are that he or

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she helps in the development of a healthcare environment is supportive and empathetic
towards the members. A respectful environment invites nurses to explore their skills and
knowledge providing them a greater domain of learning new discoveries. A leadership which
is compassionate and also empathetic ultimately results in involvement and participation of
various team staffs so that they can develop the correct sets of attitudes and also safety
culture for patients. The main principle of the leaders would be to ensure an atmosphere
where every voice of team members are heard and also acted upon so that they also feel
included in the organisation which will make them more dedicating towards quality practice.
All these help nurses to develop care strategies which follow all the guidelines of culture of
safety in healthcare mediums (Merill, 2015). A good leader will form a team where nurses
are not only collaborative but also careful, self motivated and try to achieve the best skill at
individual level. When leaders are successful, nurses tend to be comfortable and at ease with
correct level of motivation, enthusiasm and dedication. They undertake professional
development classes, follow evidence based practice and provide person centred care which
increase patient safe and ensures safe treatment. This increases patient satisfaction reduces
rate of complains, mortality, length of stays, preventable death and others.
Let it be assumed that a healthcare centre is receiving complains on a regular basis
about its inefficiency of the staff to establish therapeutic relationship with the patients. They
complain that staffs are rude, often do not arrive when called, provides late visits, argues and
do not communicate with them. Ineffective communication with the patients poses a great
threat on the patients as their expression and symptoms might not be noticed by staffs du to
inappropriate communication (Clarke et al., 2013). A transformational leaders will help the
staffs to develop a vision for the future which the nurses will try to achieve by following the
guidelines of the leaders in developing communication. Motivational and inspirational quotes
will be explained to them along with the leaders’ own experiences and other real life cases

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which will help the nurses to relate themselves. The leader will monitor the activities of the
nurse and even if they find negative attributes, they will state them with an expression of
encouragement which will make the nurse positive about her betterment. These would help in
maintain a culture of safety by development of correct communication skills. However, the
authoritarian leadership is often criticised by researchers as it gives very little scope of
communication between the leader and staffs and thereby restricts the chance of self
development of skills and knowledge (Laschinger, 2014). Punishments given by the leaders
often destroy self esteem and confidence which hampers their practices. Moreover, it also
results in development of depression and fear among the staffs where they may lose the
enthusiasm to work for humanity bas discouragement may be taken up by different staffs in
different adverse ways. These would not result in effective development of communication
skills. However, democratic leadership is exactly the opposite, here the leaders ask for
suggestions as well as make staffs participate in decision making about how everyone can
change their communication skill for betterment. Feedbacks are provided in a gentle and
polite manner which gives nurses the scope to understand their mistake and modify
themselves accordingly. Nurses become more enthusiastic and dedicating under such leaders.
Maintenance of patient safety is the primary duty of every healthcare organisation and
leaders with correct leadership skills can guide their teams to develop a culture of safety in
workplace. These would increase patients’ satisfaction and reputation of the organisation and
would decrease complain length of stay, preventable deaths, readmissions and others. While
authoritarian leadership is criticises, transformational and democratic leadership have positive
influences on patient safety. Therefore leaders should develop correct leadership style to
ensure a culturally safe environment in all healthcare centres.

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References:
Clarke, S. (2013). Safety leadership: A meta‐analytic review of transformational and
transactional leadership styles as antecedents of safety behaviours. Journal of
Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 86(1), 22-49.
Cope, V., & Murray, M. (2017). Leadership styles in nursing. Nursing Standard, 31(43), 61-
70.
Foronda, C., Budhathoki, C., & Salani, D. (2014). Use of multiuser, high-fidelity virtual
simulation to teach leadership styles to nursing students. Nurse educator, 39(5), 209-
211.
Frankel, A., & PGCMS, R. (2017). What leadership styles should senior nurses
develop?. Heart failure, 12, 40.
Frankel, A., & PGCMS, R. (2017). What leadership styles should senior nurses
develop?. Heart failure, 12, 40.
Laschinger, H. K. S. (2014). Impact of workplace mistreatment on patient safety risk and
nurse-assessed patient outcomes. Journal of Nursing Administration, 44(5), 284-290.
Lin, P. Y., MacLennan, S., Hunt, N., & Cox, T. (2015). The influences of nursing
transformational leadership style on the quality of nurses’ working lives in Taiwan: a
cross-sectional quantitative study. BMC nursing, 14(1), 33.
McFadden, K. L., Stock, G. N., & Gowen III, C. R. (2015). Leadership, safety climate, and
continuous quality improvement: impact on process quality and patient safety. Health
care management review, 40(1), 24-34.

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Merrill, K. C. (2015). Leadership style and patient safety: implications for nurse
managers. Journal of Nursing Administration, 45(6), 319-324.
Tyczkowski, B., Vandenhouten, C., Reilly, J., Bansal, G., Kubsch, S. M., & Jakkola, R.
(2015). Emotional intelligence (EI) and nursing leadership styles among nurse
managers. Nursing administration quarterly, 39(2), 172-180.