Impact Of Contemporary Challenges In Care Delivery: An Essay On Nursing Leadership.

Examine the impact of contemporary challenges in care delivery facing nursing leadership. Select and research a major issue in the delivery of care facing nurse leaders today and write a 1,250-1,500 word paper addressing the following:

1. Explain the issue(s) you have selected. Why is it a problem? What fuels the issue? Who does it impact and what specific impact does it have on patient care?
2. Describe an option for addressing the issue from a systems perspective. What entities/interests (stakeholders, organizations, operational systems, political, economic, public, private, patient) must be taken into account and how are they impacted? Be sure to highlight the direct impact the option has on patient care.
3. Discuss the qualities and traits needed of nurse leaders to effectively tackle this issue through the proposed option. Incorporate a leadership theory and AONE Nurse Executive or Manager Competencies in your response.
4. Finally, discuss the impact not successfully resolving the issue could have on the future of health care delivery.

Challenges facing Nursing Leadership in Ensuring Quality and Safety of Healthcare Services

In essence, the issue of patient safety has for a long time now been the focal point of various healthcare practice as well as nursing throughout the history of medicine. Nonetheless, there has been an increasing case of a non-deliberate accidental harm on patients seeking care services across the world (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015).  Notably, these incidents may occur at any level of healthcare whether managerial curative, clinical, preventative, or even in the general healthcare setting, and private health care sectors. Additionally, these scenarios may occur at any stage of management in the healthcare system. To the nurses’ leaders, the main focus is often based on the quality as well as the safety of patients under their watch. As a result, the safety of a patient is considered an important part of the healthcare system and therefore it assists in defining the quality of health care services (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). As nurses’ leaders, keeping patients safe has become a challenging experience due to the fact that mistakes, as well as errors, do happen on a daily basis particularly in the health care system. According to researchers, medical errors have been responsible for a large number of preventable deaths in the contemporary world thus keeping patients safe remain a great challenge (Taylor, McKinnon, Thorpe, & Gillmer, 2017). Notably, this has raised various concerns on operating systems as well as methods to be taken with an aim of reducing the likelihood of errors occurring when handling a patient.

While the main goal of various health care systems is to keep a high level of patient’s safety, there are various scenarios where these goals have been violated (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). There are various reasons why this topic has become a challenge to both the nurses, patients but as well. Apparently, some of these factors include a patient diagnosis safety, medication safety, antibiotic resistance, as well as sepsis, and unnecessary emergency department admission (Sauro, Quan, Sikdar, Faris, & Jette, 2017). While patients tend to become much older, they are therefore going to the hospital particularly with more acute conditions. In this case, there are various factors that have been isolated to case poor or lack of patient’s quality and safety in the health care system (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). Some of the main factors that has facilitated the rise in quality and patient’s safety concern include patient-related factors such as the type of illness that a patient is suffering from; the provider related factors such as the overall competence of the providers and providers motivation as well as satisfaction; and environmental related factors such as the healthcare system, the available resource and leadership and management. According to various researches, lack of quality control in regards to patient’s safety has had a huge impact on the involved stakeholders. One of the main impacts of quality related care in the health care system is the aspect of economic impact. Medical errors have been translated to about $70 billion (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). On the other hand, turning to a safety culture by medical system is likely to affect the patient’s outcome in a positive manner.

Factors Contributing to Quality and Patient’s Safety Concerns

With the increased cases of quality as well as safety-related issues in hospitals, there has been a need to set out a working initiative to reduce such incidences to happen in future and therefore leading to patient’s better outcomes (Porter-O'Grady & Malloch, 2015). Some of the adjustments that can be done include reducing the overall waiting time for all the services that are provided in the healthcare systems. While there are a lot of improvements in regards to the patient’s quality of life, there are still those health care sectors where patients can spend hours while waiting to get medical attention. Despite the fact that such cases can be as a result of a limited number of nurses available, this problem can be fixed by ensuring that it has been addressed effectively through continued review by the nurses’ leaders (Ensafian, Yaghoubi, & Yazdi, 2017). Moreover, one way of attaining quality as well as safety standards of patients in hospitals is by making sure that specialty nurses get certified as well as being involved in a local specialty organization. As a leader in nursing, this will ensure that patients receive top quality services thus ensuring that there is a guaranteed safety in service delivery. Another way that nursing management can do this is by making sure that they monitor all the process with an aim of evaluating the overall standards of care while monitoring various major metrics for quality as well as safety and therefore address any possible deficiencies.

Primarily, there are various traits that a nurse leader is expected to have to deliver a top service not only to the patients but also to other nurses and colleagues (de Wilde, de Jong, Le Brun, Guchelaar, & Schimmel, 2018). One basic skill that a nurse leader is expected to have is good communication skill. In essence, communication skills are essential, especially when disseminating information related to health care or even giving out instruction on how various procedures are to be undertaken by nurses (Dang et al., 2018). Additionally, a good nurse’s leader should have a sense of teamwork to make sure that staff satisfaction is maintained and thus creating a networking environment in a particular hospital in relation to the quality of life of patients.

While there are various leadership theories that can be incorporated into the overall AONE executive manager, the behavioral theory is no doubt one of the most suitable in this case. In this light, behavioral theory emphasizes the belief that leaders are made rather than being born (Kerner, Schmidbauer, Tietz, Marung, & Genzwuerker, 2017). This theory mostly focuses on the actions of a particular leader instead of their internal states such as mental observations (Chang, Lin, Fu, McConnell, & Sun, 2017). In essence, executive nurses often use their competencies highlighting their self-assessment due to the fact that they are useful in the overall identification of a clear possible area for growth and development. In connection to the stated theory, aspiring nurses can use this leadership competency in nurturing their behavioral approach especially in shaping their actions in relation to their daily operation in the hospital (Coleman, Peacock, Bunz, & Alberts, 2017). On the other hand, nurses’ educators can as well use these competencies as a guideline for their curriculum development, particularly for educational preparation.

Strategies for Improving Quality and Patient Safety in Healthcare Delivery

Improving the overall patient safety as well as another dimension of the healthcare requires drastic changes particularly at all level of the health care system. However, in case favorable initiatives to improve quality, as well as patient’s safety, is not successfully implement, there are various implications that are likely to be encountered in the future services delivery in the healthcare system (Aiken et al., 2017). For instance, in case the issue of competencies is not fixed, there is a high chance that more errors related to patient care, diagnosis, and medication will be committed in the future. On the other hand, if the nurses and medical practitioners are not well motivated and well equipped, then there is a chance that they will delay the process of service delivery thus resulting to long waiting time by patients in the hospitals. Failing to resolve the issue at hand successful will as well cause patients dissatisfactions in the health care system.

In conclusion, it is evident that the issue regarding the quality as well as safety healthcare of patients is a prevalent topic in most medical discourses especially in the contemporary society where there have been various limiting factors to quality medical delivery. Nonetheless, there is a need to solve issues related to quality and patient’s safety in the health care system across the world; otherwise, there would be more implications in case there are no successful initiatives to improve the quality of life of not only patients but also medical practitioners.

References

Aiken, L. H., Sloane, D., Griffiths, P., Rafferty, A. M., Bruyneel, L., McHugh, M., & Sermeus, W. (2017). Nursing skill mix in European hospitals: cross-sectional study of the association with mortality, patient ratings, and quality of care. BMJ Qual Saf, 26(7), 559-568.

Chang, A. M., Lin, A., Fu, R., McConnell, K. J., & Sun, B. (2017). Associations of Emergency Department Length of Stay With Publicly Reported Quality?of?care Measures. Academic Emergency Medicine, 24(2), 246-250.

Coleman, C. I., Peacock, W. F., Bunz, T. J., & Alberts, M. J. (2017). Effectiveness and safety of apixaban, dabigatran, and rivaroxaban versus warfarin in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation and previous stroke or transient ischemic attack. Stroke, 48(8), 2142-2149.

Dang, J. T., Switzer, N., Sun, W. Y., Raghavji, F., Birch, D. W., & Karmali, S. (2018). Evaluating the safety of intragastric balloon: An analysis of the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program. Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases.

de Wilde, S., de Jong, M. G., Le Brun, P. P., Guchelaar, H. J., & Schimmel, K. J. (2018). Unlicensed pharmaceutical preparations for clinical patient care: Ensuring safety. Pharmacoepidemiology and drug safety, 27(1), 3-8.

Ensafian, H., Yaghoubi, S., & Yazdi, M. M. (2017). Raising quality and safety of platelet transfusion services in a patient-based integrated supply chain under uncertainty. Computers & Chemical Engineering, 106, 355-372.

Kerner, T., Schmidbauer, W., Tietz, M., Marung, H., & Genzwuerker, H. V. (2017). Use of checklists improves the quality and safety of prehospital emergency care. European Journal of Emergency Medicine, 24(2), 114-119.

Porter-O'Grady, T., & Malloch, K. (2015). Leadership in nursing practice. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Sauro, K. M., Quan, H., Sikdar, K. C., Faris, P., & Jette, N. (2017). Hospital safety among neurologic patients A population-based cohort study of adverse events. Neurology, 10-1212.

Taylor, J. L., McKinnon, I., Thorpe, I., & Gillmer, B. T. (2017). The impact of transforming care on the care and safety of patients with intellectual disabilities and forensic needs. BJPsych bulletin, 41(4), 205-208.