Advocacy and Nursing Leadership

Advocacy involves engaging others, exercising your voice, and mobilizing evidence to influence policy and practice. It means speaking out against inequity and inequality. It entails participating directly and indirectly in political processes and acknowledging the importance of evidence, power and politics in advancing policy options” (para. 1).

Nurses demonstrate leadership by advocating for clients including individuals, families, communities, populations, as well as the workplace and the profession (CNO, 2002).

• Advocacy for clients includes helping them to access appropriate health care (CNO, 2019) and by providing, facilitating, advocating, and promoting the best possible care for clients (CNO, 2002).
• Workplace/professional nursing advocacy includes advocating for: a quality practice setting that supports nurses’ ability to provide safe, effective, and ethical care (CNO, 2002) and improving the quality of their practice setting to support safe patient care (CNO,2019), which includes evidence-informed decision-making in their practice (CNA,2017).
• Social advocacy includes advocating for: publicly administered health systems that include a full continuum of accessible health care service and expanding the range of available health-care choices (CNA,2017).
• Social justice advocacy includes advocating for broader systemic change to address the social, economic, and political causes of health inequities (O’Mahony Paquin, 2011)

1. Perform a review of quality literature related to the concept of advocacy. Consider the required and recommended textbooks in the BScN program, foundational published literature from journals and books. These should come from disciplines outside of nursing such as sociology or psychology as well as the nursing literature. Some of the resources may be older which is quite appropriate for this assignment as advocacy is a core concept in nursing, and these ideas are not new.

2. Thoroughly explore and analyze advocacy as a concept, in general and within nursing. Discuss items from a concept analysis that are most relevant. For more information on concept analysis, see references on the Rodgers method (Foley & Davis, 2017). Exploration and analysis may include the following steps:
   • define advocacy as a concept (related core elements, perceptions, feelings, antonyms, synonyms)
   • determine the defining attributes/key characteristics of advocacy
   • identify other concepts related to advocacy
   • identify the antecedents and consequences for advocacy (antecedents are incidents leading to the advocacy, consequences instead follow advocacy)

3. Consider a situation that you have encountered or a topic that you are passionate about related to advocacy in health/health care. This could be a situation that you have personally encountered in your own professional nursing practice or a relevant topic related to health/health care. The situation should be one in which advocacy was either lacking, or exemplified, to allow for effective reflection.

1. Briefly describe the situation or topic. Be sure that any client identifying information is removed.
2. Thoroughly explore the concept of advocacy in general and in the context of nursing, integrating a variety of high-quality sources.
3. Draw a conclusion around the meaning of advocacy based on your synthesis.
4. Explain how advocacy relates to professional caring in nursing.
5. Discuss how your more comprehensive understanding of advocacy informs your professional nursing care as it relates to the chosen situation or topic
6. Reflect on how you may integrate your more comprehensive understanding of advocacy into your future client care and role as a nurse. Be specific and utilize quality evidence related to the specific topic or practice area to support your reflection.