In this assignment, you will be writing a 1,000-1,250 word paper describing the differing approaches of nursing leaders and managers to issues in practice. To complete this assignment, do the following:
Select an issue from the following list: bullying, unit closers and restructuring, floating, nurse turnover, nurse staffing ratios, use of contract employees (i.e., registry and travel nurses), or magnet designation.
- Describe the selected issue. Discuss how it impacts quality of care and patient safety in the setting in which it occurs.
- Discuss how professional standards of practice should be demonstrated in this situation to help rectify the issue or maintain professional conduct.
- Explain the differing roles of nursing leaders and nursing managers in this instance and discuss the different approaches they take to address the selected issue and promote patient safety and quality care. Support your rationale by using the theories, principles, skills, and roles of the leader versus manager described in your readings.
- Discuss what additional aspects managers and leaders would need to initiate in order to ensure professionalism throughout diverse health care settings while addressing the selected issue.
- Describe a leadership style that would best address the chosen issue.
- Explain why this style could be successful in this setting.
Use at least three peer-reviewed journal articles
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
Nurse Turnover
Nurse leaders and managers play a key role in ensuring that nurses play their role in patient care and to meet the needs of diverse patient populations. During the contemporary times, the demand for quality care outcomes has increased. As a result, the demand on nursing role to improve the quality of care has also grown. However, nurses experience numerous challenges in the course of their work that leaders and managers should address regardless of the fact that their roles differ. While health care organizations experience numerous issues, nurse turnover is the most critical since it affects the nurses’ capacity to deliver quality care, requires advanced standards of nursing practice, and greater input of transformational leaders to motivate the remaining workforce.
Problem Description and Impact
Nurse turnover is one of the leading challenges in healthcare settings since it affects the number and capacity of nurses. Nurse turnover is the voluntary or involuntary leaving of the nursing profession, especially among registered nurses (Dewanto & Wardhani, 2018). Nurse turnover is a critical human resource problem in hospitals due to the reduction in the number of RNs working in a specific facility. Nurse turnover affects the care quality and patient safety since the remaining nurses cannot meet the demand of the increasing patient population. Besides, the remaining nurses experience turnover, which affects patient safety. For example, when nurses are tired from working long shifts and caring for more patients than they should, hospitals suffer the risk of high rates of medical errors, which are detrimental and even fatal. Thus, nurse turnover remains a critical issues necessitating immediate action to improve patient outcomes, such as quality and safety.
Professional Standards of Practice
Professional standards of practice play a key role in addressing nurse turnover and related problems, such as burnout. Professional standards define the competent level of quality in patient care. They reflect the desired level of performance that nurses should achieve when providing care to patients (Schmidt & McArthur, 2018). The professional standards of practice helps in addressing challenges associated with nurse turnover by defining expectations to maintain safe and quality nursing practice. For example, when a healthcare setting experiences a shortage of nurses due to high rate of turnover, collaboration can help to maintain optimum care and reduce burnout. The standards also support nurse leaders and managers to collaborate with nurses whenever they experience the nurse turnover challenge, such as through role restructuring to cover the remaining gaps when nurses leave.
Nurse Leaders vs. Nurse Managers
Most people assume that leaders and managers play the same role in organizations. However, in theory and practice, nurse leaders play a different role from nurse managers in healthcare settings. Besides playing relatively different roles, the two also require different skill sets. Nurse managers requires the competence necessary to assign the daily routines and allocate resources to meet the daily demands of care. Conversely, nurse leaders focus on high level goals, such as performance and productivity through skills, such as the ability to motivate nurses (Ogbolu, Scrandis & Fitzpatrick, 2018). Therefore, nurse managers, within the context of nurse turnover, ensures that the remaining nurses have clear tasks and routines and adequate resources to meet their daily, weekly, or monthly performance targets and goals. On the other hand, nurse leaders ensure that the remaining nurses are motivated to improve performance and productivity. Leaders can achieve the objective using theories of motivation, such as rewards and creating a proper work-life balance for remaining nurses. The two roles are different, but important in addressing the nurse turnover issue.
Additional Roles of Managers and Leaders
Considering the negative impact of nurse turnover in healthcare organizations, nurse leaders and managers should assume their roles seriously to ensure that new and remaining nurses work competently to deliver quality and safe care. For example, the nurse manager could recognize the importance of resources, such as health information system to reduce the workload for remaining nurses. They should also assign tasks and duties considering the reduced number of nurses and ensure that all necessary work is done. Nurse leaders should set new goals and objectives for remaining nurses and motivate them to achieve them. A nurse leader has a critical role in communicating and collaborating with remaining nurses to motivate them to improve their performance and productivity (Ogbolu, Scrandis & Fitzpatrick, 2018). They can communicate with remaining nurses and collect their views and opinions regarding how to improve care delivery. The nurse leader should develop the level of competence necessary to overcome the challenges associated with nurse turnover and ensure that patients continues to receive quality and safe services.
Transformational Leadership
Creating a work environment for nurses, following nurse turnover, which maintains quality and safe care requires major changes throughout the facility. Transformational leadership has the potential to create the necessary change in the organizational culture, the way nurses are deployed and maintained, and how work is structured to improve performance and productivity goals. Transformational leadership in healthcare focuses on the need for leaders to develop and work with employees in an empowering and motivating environment to improve performance (Dias, Mathew, & Michael, 2019). While the hospital leadership might not immediately fill the gap left by leaving nurses, they can capitalize on the remaining ones to maintain safety and quality of care. Thus, embracing transformational leadership could develop competence in the remaining nurses to continue providing optimum care to patients regardless of an increase in the demand for care.
Rationale for Transformational Leadership
Addressing the nurse turnover challenge necessitates major changes in the healthcare setting to ensure that the remaining nurses are adequately competence to close the gap left by the remaining nurses. Thus, a transformational leader will empower and develop the remaining nurses to meet the current and future demands in a safe working environment. For example, a transformational leader will implement the necessary interdisciplinary collaboration to meet the demand of all patients in the hospital. The leader requires developing and motivating remaining and new nurses to embrace the changing roles and increasing demands for their services due to the shortage and pending deployment of new nurses. Besides, the current nurses will lead the efforts to help new nurses to adjust to the organization to prevent future turnover. All remaining nurses should be motivated to improve organizational ownership and commitment to achieve organizational performance and productivity goals.
Conclusion
Nurses play a major role in health care settings while providing quality and safe care to patients. However, their role can be affected by issues, such as nurse turnover, which reduces their capacity to deliver safe and quality care. Thus, effective nurse leadership should implement an effective leadership approach, such as transformational to address nurse turnover and other challenges affecting nurses’ ability to deliver care in a safe environment.
References
Dewanto, A. & Wardhani, V. (2018). Nurse Turnover and Perceived Causes and Consequences: A Preliminary Study at Private Hospitals in Indonesia. BMC Nursing, 17(2),
Dias, N., Mathew, N., & Michael, J. (2019). Transformational Leadership in Nursing: Aspiring Leaders Development Program for Indian American Nurses. Nurse Leader, 17(5), 432-439
Ogbolu, V., Scrandis, D.A., & Fitzpatrick, G. (2018). Bariers and Facilitators of Care of Diverse Patients: Nurse Leader Perspectives and Nurse Manager Implications. Journal of Nursing Management. 26(1), 3-10
Schmidt, B.J. & McArthur, E.C. (2018). Professional Nursing Values: A Concept Analysis. Nursing Forum. 53(1), 69-75.
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