Clinical Nurse Leader Role Analysis

Clinical Nurse Leader Role in the Emergency Department

Role Description

The Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL) is a Master’s prepared Registered Nurse educated as a generalist, who is not educated towards specialization in a particular discipline, consequently, providing the CNL the opportunity to be a valuable asset in multiple venues (Perry, 2011). The addition of the CNL role in the emergency department (ED), will bridge the gap of professional practice to include leadership at the point of care delivery (Rankin, 2015). The CNL is an expert clinician with the supplementary skills to coach, mentor, lead, and provide evidence-based reinforcement for the nursing team. Furthermore the CNL possesses the knowledge to promote at the microsystem level, the evaluation and improvement of clinical outcomes through risk analysis and quality improvement initiatives.

Rationale

Charge nurses are too enmeshed in the day-to-day operations to effectively evaluate patient outcomes, be a client advocate, educator, information manager, systems analyst, risk anticipator, team manager. The CNL will function as a unit-based leader, working to laterally integrate care at the microsystem level, however, they can assist with change implementation at the macro-system level as well. The utilization of a CNL will decrease fragmentation of care and unify the divergent disciplines involved in the care of the ED patient. Moreover, the CNL serves as a bridge between the educator, manager, staff nurses, providers, and