The Impact Of Leadership And Quality Improvement In Nursing

Management and quality improvement are essential in clinical practice and healthcare. The focus of this piece of writing is to discuss the impact of leadership and quality improvement in improving the quality of healthcare for patients. Leadership and quality improvement practices are essential in providing high quality patient care, it should not be considered to be an issue beyond the staff nurse

Leadership

Communication and Conflict Resolution Skills

Communication skills are essential for effective leadership. The healthcare organisation is complex and fast paced, the need to be heard and understood is critical to the delivery of high quality care. Leaders listen to those around them, they are willing to accept the diverse set of views

It is this communication that leads to positive change and high quality care.

Influence and Motivate

The health care environment is stressful and face paced, this often leads to staff burn out and a loss of morale (Jennings, 2008). Leaders help create a positive working environment for staff. Leaders ensure that staff feel valued, this increases morale among staff which has a positive effect on productivity. Leaders have an ability to empathise with their colleagues, an effective leader will be followed by staff that feel supported by them.

Nurses are now working with more accountability and autonomy, this means there is an increased need for leadership skill among all nursing staff. It is not only required by those in a position of management but also by staff nurses on the ward who have a responsibility to demonstrate leadership skills when dealing with nursing students and healthcare assistant staff (Harris et al, 2006). Leaders create a shared vision among staff and empower them to make their own decisions. Leaders empower other staff converting dutiful sub ordinates into the leaders of the future (Cutis, E et al., 2011).

Quality improvement involves collecting data by activities such as incident reporting, handling complaints, research effectiveness, and clinical audit. This data is used to develop improvement methods which are implemented in order to improve the quality and safety of patient care (U.S Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).

Nursing and Midwifery Quality-Care Metrics are a standardised set of metrics introduced in 2014 across healthcare services in Ireland. Care-metrics are process performance indicators which provide a framework to measure nursing and midwifery care (Foulkes, 2014). The metrics are based on national standards, legislation and evidence based practice. ‘Test your Care’ is the name of the electronic program that is used to record and report on metrics in many hospitals throughout Ireland (White, 2014). This programme identifies areas of weakness in fundamental nursing care at an individual ward based level. Identification of these problems allows the appropriate implementations such as education or reorganisation of resources to be put in place in order to improve patient