Like any other profession, nursing requires top-notch leadership skills to streamline healthcare practices. It involves efficient communication, sharing your insight into what you have learned with your colleagues and promoting a sense of direction that will positively impact your community. In addition, your patients rely on you to inform them about their health progress.
Nursing leadership also inspires you to scale higher to acquire strong licensure. Whether you are still in nursing school or registered nurse, enrolling for courses specializing in nursing leadership is an essential ingredient to shaping your career. Here is everything you need to know about nursing leadership and management.
What is nursing leadership or management?
To be declared a successful nursing leader or manager, your skills should allow you to motivate, support and inspire budding and professional nurses alike. Studies suggest that nurse leaders should be passionate about excelling in the healthcare sector by applying what they have learned to society.
Nursing leadership roles may include:
- Being at the forefront of creating and implementing patient care programs
- Using nursing industry news and research to instil the best practices
- Inspiring other nurses to be good in what they do
Why is nursing leadership important?
The whole point of listing nurses under essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic is to change people’s perception of nurses as being doctors’ assistants. Today, nurses are part of the life-saving team.
The team relies on nurse leaders to guide other nurses, ensuring they follow vital healthcare protocols to save patients’ lives. Other reasons why nursing heads are essential to include:
Voicing their opinions and implementing quality-assuring care
If you think that the work of nurses is to implement doctors’ directives, you need to think again. Today, registered nurses can voice their opinion on quality care and advocate for strategies geared towards better healthcare practices.
For some reason or another, a primary care physician may not be available to tend to patients, leaving nurses to do it on their behalf. In such a case, a nurse leader can oversee healthcare activities without waiting for their doctor’s orders.
It helps them access authoritative resources to make crucial decisions
Gone are the days when nurses were locked out of healthcare conference halls during board meetings. Instead, nurses are transforming from bystanders to crucial decision-makers. As a nursing head, part of your duty involves designing efficient decision-making frameworks to solve problems.
Take advantage of the various online resources that readily offer critical thinking skills and evidence-based decision-making frameworks to help you make wiser decisions.
It relieves nursing staff from burnout
No other time had ever recorded staff burnout than when COVID-19 took a toll on people’s lives. Nurses were forced to work overtime to meet the growing needs of ailing patients streaming in large numbers into the facilities.
Consequently, nurses developed physical and health complications, affecting their work productivity. As this keeps happening, patients’ lives will be at risk.
Fortunately, nurses proficient in leadership skills can detect warning signs of burnout and find ready solutions before they get worse. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities that value nursing management may experience fewer burnout situations among their staff.
Motivating other nurses
When nursing heads are left to manage others, streamlining change in the medical world becomes easy. However, any caregiver that participates in a mentorship program has what it takes to put what they have learned into practice.
It also shows other nurses that they can be leaders who the community will value. It also improves retention rates of budding nurses and helps them to embrace the practice.
Final Thoughts:
A manager can only understand work ethics if they understand the relationship between ethics and leadership. For example, the first rule of nursing is to commit no harm. When leaders have such an ethical element on their minds, they will protect patients and save their lives if disease strikes.
Any nurse professional with a zeal to be a leader in the future should understand what it involves and why it is a critical aspect to shape their careers. Whether you are a new nurse or have served the nursing fraternity for years, it will be in your best interest to enrol in a program that features leadership courses.
