Nursing Leadership Case Study

Introduction Nursing leadership requires continual attention and flexibility. Recognizing changes in both the work environment and those front-line nurses providing care to patients on a continual basis. Many times, nurses can find themselves in a situation where self-care has been placed on hold and primary concerns only lie with care of the patient. As a result, the lack of self-care promotes an environment of stressors, thereby affecting patient care and team cohesion. As a leader, one needs to be able to motivate, set goals for the team, build a cohesive team, manage, and be able to overcome challenges that the team may encounter. A healthy working environment includes being treated fairly and with respect, trust, communication and

As nursing leaders their job include those previously mentioned while also addressing other, which would include a lack of resources, such as shift scheduling, patient-nurse ratio, supply management, and overall personnel availability. Although the aforementioned lack of resources must be addressed by nursing leadership, those leaders must find a way to continue providing patient care and nursing self-care. Marquis and Huston, mentioned that leadership are required to build bridges and find solutions to those complex health-care problems that are encountered by the nurses on a daily basis. (Marquis & Huston, 2015) Leadership must continually focus on finding solutions for promoting a healthy work environment. For example, having a reduction of at least one patient per nurse would make it possible to reduce patient mortality by nine percent in critical care units. (Ulrich, Lavandero, Woods, & Early, 2014) As mentioned before, stress can cause the nurse to become rude and short tempered with both patient(s) and coworkers. Nurses feeling overworked and unappreciated also add to stressors, once again affecting the care of patients and attitudes towards

They include being able to recognize when and how stress is triggered, specific techniques to neutralize the stressor(s), and enabling them to navigate once again through life. (Kahnen, Gerard, & Qin, 2016) Chapels, lounges and possibly relaxation rooms would be effective ways a nurse could effectively intervene in decreasing current stressors, allowing them to be able to function more effectively upon return. Although the use of lounges and chapels would not result in an additional cost for the hospital, the implementation for the creation of relaxation rooms would include soothing music, aromatherapy oils, massage chairs, and meditation areas. For many hospitals that would require the use of already established room, requiring no structural expansion, only equipment costs. The costs would be minimal when placed in comparison with patient dissatisfaction, hospital acquired illnesses resulting from the decreased level of care, and high nurse turnover resulting from high patient-to-nurse ratios. For any leaders looking to incorporate some of the aforementioned interventions costs can be minimal. Primary costs result from purchasing items such as the massage chair, meditation benches, etc. On the other hand, being able to establish a place to setup as a relaxation room, requires searching for minimally used rooms already within the organization. Once again, it focuses on the leader’s ability to