Culture of Safer Patient Care †Free Samples to Students

Question: Discuss about the Culture of Safer Patient Care. Answer: Introduction: Patient safety is one of the disciples of the healthcare sectors which mainly provide significance to a culture of safety in the healthcare environment. This culture mainly involves prevention, reduction, reporting as well as analysis of medical error which may lead to threats in patients lives. In order to develop such culture among the healthcare staffs, leaders often play an important role in the establishment of a highly expertise team with best skills and knowledge in the genre. This essay will first discuss patient safety, followed by the importance of leadership in patient safety. Three import at leadership styles will also be discussed along with the simplification of the styles by depicting case scenario. Patient safety is defined as the maintenance of safety which results in prevention of any types of harm to the patient. Errors, injuries, infections accidents of nurses and other healthcare professional and many others often hamper patients health resulting in their higher level of suffering, longer hospital stays as well as poor quality life (Frankel PGCMS, 2017). Hence, strong healthcare competent teams under effective leadership are important for reduction of infection rates, putting proper checks in places for prevention of mistakes and also ensuring string lines communications between different stakeholders of healthcare like hospital staff, patients and their families to ensure safety of patients and provide them a good quality time during their stay in hospitals. Effective leadership in clinical practice will help in the foundation of a supportive, empathic, available, faithful and respectful environment among the team members in the working environment. A leadership core strategy is to ensure that voice is encouraged, heard and acted on across the organization as well as provide practical support to staffs to develop innovations within safe boundaries. Such a supportive leadership provides a greater scope for nurses to develop their knowledge and enhance their skills under their leaders about the correct procedures to maintain a culture of safety (Wong, 2015). The teammates also effectively reflect upon their tasks under the leaders and thereby develop the knowledge of quality of care provided. Proper approaches of leadership ensure that the nurses are more careful in their approaches, are self motivated and are thriving for the best care to their patients. All these result to better experiences of the patients, lesser mortality, and lesser readmissions helping them to survive the ordeals (Wong Laschinger, 2013). Leaders ensure that the teammates are following all the principle of nursing, following evidence based study, undergoing regular professional development course to develop skills, are happy, enthusiastic and compassionate and empathetic to their patients and are in knowledge with the modern proper nursing techniques and procedures. All these ensure patient safety under effective leadership. Three important leadership styles that can be discussed in the context are the transformational leadership, democratic leadership and Laissez-faire leadership. The first leadership called the transformation leadership mainly portrays the leaders as an example that the team members will follow. The leaders would exhibit a behaviour which will inspire the follower and at the same time make them change for the better (Tyczkowski et al., 2015). This type of leaders will mainly portray hard work as the main pathway of success and encourage the workers to perform much beyond expectations. Such leaders never put themselves in the first position as they place more importance on achieving the best on behalf of the organization. These leaders also provide a clear vision to the workers for the future which motivates them to exceed themselves. They question old assumptions and also traditional so that workers get the scope to come up with novel ideas which help in solving issues more effectively . The second kind of leadership is the democratic leadership where the team leader encourages the teammates to speak up and join a process of decision making (Wong, Cummings Duchame, 2013). Such kind of open communication is promoted by the leader as they feel that it makes the staff members feel that their voices matter. The leaders remain concerned about every activity that go in the organization or believe that they can influence those situations if they get a chance to act on them. The teammates are allowed to get their own personal responsibilities and are also accountable for reaching certain goals. The leaders provide feedback to the teammates so that they can alter their practices accordingly. The leaders mainly try to focus on the improvement of the quality of the systems as well as the processes but not on finding errors made by team members. The next leadership is the Laissez-faire Leadership where the leaders perform very little supervision and prefer a hands-off approa ch to regular day operations. They mainly allow workers to work according to their own will believing that they would be able to do well without supervision and guidance. Although, it allows the scope of independent thinking of the nurses and make them less dependent on other , it also has negative consequences which handle patient safety and quality practice like decisions are not made on time , fewer changes happen at workplace, quality improvement happens only when need and many others (Clarke, 2013). The efficiency of the three types of leadership in the maintenance of hand hygiene of the nurses should be discussed. In a setting, where compliance of nurses with hand hygiene is complained, a transformation leader will help the team with inspirational motivation with examples of some of the great nurses and their own stories about hand hygiene will help them to develop visions which can be achieved. Motivation will help the nurses to stick to hand hygiene guidelines (Touvenaue et al., 2013). The leader will also monitor their work and find faults and deviations but at the same time her expression would be such that it would help them to overcome such practices for maintaining culture of safety. These leaders never use negative words and constantly motivate their workers to comply with hand hygiene. In the democratic relationship, the nurse will invite the workers in open discussions and decision making regarding the issues they are facing while maintaining hand hygiene so that thei r issues are addressed to reduce their unhappiness and barriers in their practices. The leader will give responsibility, accountability as well as feedback regarding their performance on hand hygiene and accordingly hey should modify their practice for betterment. The democratic leaders will never pay importance to mistakes but will pay importance to quality improvement of systems and processes regarding hand hygiene (Christina et al., 2014). Laissez Faire Leadership will have negative impacts as the leaders take a hands-off role where they do not themselves intervene and hence the nurses who may be new to the ward will have difficulty as they would not be able to properly practice hand hygiene and their mistakes would also not be noted by the leaders. These leaders would feel aimless and would never be able to develop their skilled and knowledge without any one guidance. As a result changes in quality may not take place as the leader will only intervene when serious issues take pla ce which may compromise a patients life and career of a new nurse. Although independent thinking may develop, but skills enhancement may not take place for the team members (Murray, Sundin Cope, 2017). Therefore, patient safety is important for better quality life of patients, reducing complains, lesser hospitals readmission, reduced length of stay at hospitals and others. Effective leaderships like transformational and democratic leadership have positive influences in patient care and safety whereas Laissez Faire Leadership will have negative impact. Hence, nursing leaders have to follow proper styles so that they can ensure a culture of safety in the organizations. A healthcare organization where proper leadership skills are exhibited by the leaders of the team ensure that patients have better quality of lives, lesser hospital stays, lesser readmission to hospitals and preventable deaths. This will in turn increase the reputation of the organization. References: Christiana Stevens, S., Hemmings, L., Scott, C., Lawler, A., White, C. (2014). Clinical leadership style and hand hygiene compliance.Leadership in Health Services,27(1), 20-30. Clarke, S. (2013). 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