Patient Safety and Effective Leadership: Styles and Implications

This essay delves into the critical relationship between patient safety and effective leadership within healthcare environments. It emphasizes the significance of a safety-focused culture, highlighting the roles of prevention, reduction, and analysis of medical errors. The essay explores the importance of leadership in fostering a skilled healthcare team, discusses three key leadership styles—transformational, democratic, and laissez-faire—and illustrates their practical application through a case scenario involving hand hygiene compliance. The essay argues that transformational and democratic leadership styles positively influence patient care and safety, while Laissez-faire leadership may have negative impacts. Ultimately, the essay underscores the need for nursing leaders to adopt appropriate leadership styles to cultivate a culture of safety, leading to improved patient outcomes, reduced hospital stays, and enhanced organizational reputation. The references provided support the claims made throughout the essay, citing various research papers and studies.

Running head: PATIENT SAFETY AND EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
PATIENT SAFETY AND EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
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PATIENT SAFETY AND EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP
Patient safety is one of the disciples of the healthcare sectors which mainly provide
significance to a culture of safety in the healthcare environment. This culture mainly involves
prevention, reduction, reporting as well as analysis of medical error which may lead to threats in
patient’s lives. In order to develop such culture among the healthcare staffs, leaders often play an
important role in the establishment of a highly expertise team with best skills and knowledge in
the genre. This essay will first discuss patient safety, followed by the importance of leadership in
patient safety. Three import at leadership styles will also be discussed along with the
simplification of the styles by depicting case scenario.
Patient safety is defined as the maintenance of safety which results in prevention of any
types of harm to the patient. Errors, injuries, infections accidents of nurses and other healthcare
professional and many others often hamper patient’s health resulting in their higher level of
suffering, longer hospital stays as well as poor quality life (Frankel & PGCMS, 2017). Hence,
strong healthcare competent teams under effective leadership are important for reduction of
infection rates, putting proper checks in places for prevention of mistakes and also ensuring
string lines communications between different stakeholders of healthcare like hospital staff,
patients and their families to ensure safety of patients and provide them a good quality time
during their stay in hospitals.
Effective leadership in clinical practice will help in the foundation of a supportive,
empathic, available, faithful and respectful environment among the team members in the
working environment. A leadership core strategy is to ensure that ‘voice is encouraged, heard
and acted on across the organization as well as provide practical support to staffs to develop
innovations within safe boundaries. Such a supportive leadership provides a greater scope for
nurses to develop their knowledge and enhance their skills under their leaders about the correct

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procedures to maintain a culture of safety (Wong, 2015). The teammates also effectively reflect
upon their tasks under the leaders and thereby develop the knowledge of quality of care
provided. Proper approaches of leadership ensure that the nurses are more careful in their
approaches, are self motivated and are thriving for the best care to their patients. All these result
to better experiences of the patients, lesser mortality, and lesser readmissions helping them to
survive the ordeals (Wong & Laschinger, 2013). Leaders ensure that the teammates are
following all the principle of nursing, following evidence based study, undergoing regular
professional development course to develop skills, are happy, enthusiastic and compassionate
and empathetic to their patients and are in knowledge with the modern proper nursing techniques
and procedures. All these ensure patient safety under effective leadership.
Three important leadership styles that can be discussed in the context are the
transformational leadership, democratic leadership and Laissez-faire leadership. The first
leadership called the transformation leadership mainly portrays the leaders as an example that the
team members will follow. The leaders would exhibit a behaviour which will inspire the follower
and at the same time make them change for the better (Tyczkowski et al., 2015). This type of
leaders will mainly portray hard work as the main pathway of success and encourage the workers
to perform much beyond expectations. Such leaders never put themselves in the first position as
they place more importance on achieving the best on behalf of the organization. These leaders
also provide a clear vision to the workers for the future which motivates them to exceed
themselves. They question old assumptions and also traditional so that workers get the scope to
come up with novel ideas which help in solving issues more effectively. The second kind of
leadership is the democratic leadership where the team leader encourages the teammates to speak
up and join a process of decision making (Wong, Cummings & Duchame, 2013). Such kind of

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open communication is promoted by the leader as they feel that it makes the staff members feel
that their voices matter. The leaders remain concerned about every activity that go in the
organization or believe that they can influence those situations if they get a chance to act on
them. The teammates are allowed to get their own personal responsibilities and are also
accountable for reaching certain goals. The leaders provide feedback to the teammates so that
they can alter their practices accordingly. The leaders mainly try to focus on the improvement of
the quality of the systems as well as the processes but not on finding errors made by team
members. The next leadership is the Laissez-faire Leadership where the leaders perform very
little supervision and prefer a hands-off approach to regular day operations. They mainly allow
workers to work according to their own will believing that they would be able to do well without
supervision and guidance. Although, it allows the scope of independent thinking of the nurses
and make them less dependent on other , it also has negative consequences which handle patient
safety and quality practice like decisions are not made on time , fewer changes happen at
workplace, quality improvement happens only when need and many others (Clarke, 2013).
The efficiency of the three types of leadership in the maintenance of hand hygiene of the
nurses should be discussed. In a setting, where compliance of nurses with hand hygiene is
complained, a transformation leader will help the team with inspirational motivation with
examples of some of the great nurses and their own stories about hand hygiene will help them to
develop visions which can be achieved. Motivation will help the nurses to stick to hand hygiene
guidelines (Touvenaue et al., 2013). The leader will also monitor their work and find faults and
deviations but at the same time her expression would be such that it would help them to
overcome such practices for maintaining culture of safety. These leaders never use negative
words and constantly motivate their workers to comply with hand hygiene. In the democratic

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relationship, the nurse will invite the workers in open discussions and decision making regarding
the issues they are facing while maintaining hand hygiene so that their issues are addressed to
reduce their unhappiness and barriers in their practices. The leader will give responsibility,
accountability as well as feedback regarding their performance on hand hygiene and accordingly
hey should modify their practice for betterment. The democratic leaders will never pay
importance to mistakes but will pay importance to quality improvement of systems and processes
regarding hand hygiene (Christina et al., 2014). Laissez Faire Leadership will have negative
impacts as the leaders take a hands-off role where they do not themselves intervene and hence
the nurses who may be new to the ward will have difficulty as they would not be able to properly
practice hand hygiene and their mistakes would also not be noted by the leaders. These leaders
would feel aimless and would never be able to develop their skilled and knowledge without any
one guidance. As a result changes in quality may not take place as the leader will only intervene
when serious issues take place which may compromise a patient’s life and career of a new nurse.
Although independent thinking may develop, but skills enhancement may not take place for the
team members (Murray, Sundin & Cope, 2017).
Therefore, patient safety is important for better quality life of patients, reducing
complains, lesser hospitals readmission, reduced length of stay at hospitals and others. Effective
leaderships like transformational and democratic leadership have positive influences in patient
care and safety whereas Laissez Faire Leadership will have negative impact. Hence, nursing
leaders have to follow proper styles so that they can ensure a culture of safety in the
organizations. A healthcare organization where proper leadership skills are exhibited by the
leaders of the team ensure that patients have better quality of lives, lesser hospital stays, lesser

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readmission to hospitals and preventable deaths. This will in turn increase the reputation of the
organization.
References:

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Christiana Stevens, S., Hemmings, L., Scott, C., Lawler, A., & White, C. (2014). Clinical
leadership style and hand hygiene compliance. Leadership in Health Services, 27(1), 20-
30.
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.
Frankel, A., & PGCMS, R. (2017). What leadership styles should senior nurses develop?. Heart
failure, 12, 40.
Murray, M., Sundin, D., & Cope, V. (2017). The nexus of nursing leadership and a culture of
safer patient care. Journal of Clinical Nursing.
Touveneau, S., Clack, L., Ginet, C., Stewardson, A., Schindler, M., Bourrier, M., ... & Sax, H.
(2013). P168: Leadership styles of ward head nurses and implementation success–a
qualitative inquiry in the framework of a mixed-method study on hand hygiene
promotion through patient involvement. Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection
Control, 2(S1), P168.
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.
Wong, C. A. (2015). Connecting nursing leadership and patient outcomes: state of the
science. Journal of nursing management, 23(3), 275-278.

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Wong, C. A., & Laschinger, H. K. (2013). Authentic leadership, performance, and job
satisfaction: the mediating role of empowerment. Journal of advanced nursing, 69(4),
947-959.
Wong, C. A., Cummings, G. G., & Ducharme, L. (2013). The relationship between nursing
leadership and patient outcomes: a systematic review update. Journal of nursing
management, 21(5), 709-724.