Improving Patient Outcomes through Effective Leadership in Medical Surgical Units

Challenges in Medical Surgical Units

Task:

Working in medical surgical unit is quite challenging as nurses need to deal with different types of patients with various health issues. Sometimes nurses are required to work overtime due to excessive workload and still it becomes difficult to organize things properly. Due to lack of experience and knowledge nurses face challenges in Telemetry while working in medical surgical unit and hence, they require an environment with significant opportunity to deliver safer as well as accessible care to improve the health outcome of the patients and the satisfaction of the healthcare professionals (Coxen, Van der Vaart & Stander, 2016). A proper leadership can be most effective in such situations to guide the organization through challenges. It is also required for creating and sustaining cultures of safety in order to reduce errors and keep the patients, employees, and communities, safe when crises arise (Sfantou et al., 2017). Studies mentioned that diversity in healthcare management can be helpful in enhancing the quality of care and a proper leadership approach helps to encounter regardless of the challenges (Sonnino, 2016). Different types of leadership approaches are there and it is an evidence-based practice used by the healthcare organizations for high productivity and strengthening the quality as well as integration of care (de Zulueta, 2016).

Transformational leadership is a kind of leadership approach as per the researchers, in which leaders have the ability to inspire confidence, staff respect through shared vision that increases productivity and strengthen employee morale (Choi, Goh, Adam & Tan, 2016). On the other hand, transactional leadership leads to an improvement in the production as well as the satisfaction of the patients (Boamah, Laschinger, Wong & Clarke, 2018). Therefore, a leadership initiative approach is highly necessary for the medical surgical unit to organize the staffs and manage the whole unit properly through an effective teamwork. During the leadership initiative program the student nurses are introduced to the ideas of leadership and its importance in the healthcare process to improve the quality of care (Hanse, Harlin, Jarebrant, Ulin & Winkel, 2016). The program will consist of some educational approaches and it will be designed with some training methods and classroom teaching to develop the skill of the student nurses.

It will be helpful in developing an awareness of knowledge as well as attributes required to become an effective leader in the working settings. It will also identify key interpersonal and teamwork skills that is most essential in managing the teamwork. The leadership initiative will also observe and practice some selected interpersonal skills from the students that are required for the leadership and teamwork in the clinical settings (Richter et al., 2015).

Hence, leadership is a cornerstone of progress and it acts as the source of strength in the time of crisis. This leadership initiative program in the medical surgical team will require an educational program to be introduced in which new nurses will participate to develop their leadership skill and classroom teaching will be conducted for a certain period of time in this regard. Some evidence based videos will be shown to the participants along with literature support evidence, in order to establish the importance of leadership in healthcare and different approaches in this regard. This leadership initiative program will fix the issues and improve the performance of the nurses which will lead to increased patients’ satisfaction.