- The Nurse Leader's Role as Advocate for The Nursing Profession.
Advocacy is a term that stands for supporting a proposal or cause. There are a number of workplace concerns arising in the nursing sphere. In order to resolve them and promote a positive work atmosphere, point-of-care nurses need to advocate for the profession.
Examples of Point-of-Care Advocacy
- Advocacy for the nursing profession can be undertaken by point of care nurses once they enroll in councils, committees and quality-improvement teams. By becoming a member, it is vital to represent the requirements of both patients and colleagues.
- Participating in organization-wide activities is a means to engage effectively in advocating. Most often surveys are issued by hospitals to promote staff engagement. A single opinion may cause a drastic change in plans for this. Employee forum or town hall conferences can be made use of by nurses to discuss their concerns. For effective and positive advocacy, communicating properly and building trust are important. To begin with advocating, the nurse can identify an issue, propose a solution and offer o participate.
- When teaching young nurses, it is possible to advocate for the profession at the bedside itself. Serving as good role model and striving to help others absorb good nurse qualities is a form of advocacy.
- Describing the strength of the nursing profession when questioned about it can serve as a means of advocacy. Other options include enhancing understanding of the nursing role by the public (Buresh, Gordon, S., &. Benner, 2006). To asses, plan and intervene to ensure high-quality patient care is the nurse’s responsibility. This should be conveyed to the public.
For efficient advocacy the following attributes must be possessed by the nurses involved. They are:
- Good Communication;
- Problem Solving abilities;
- Influence; and
- Collaboration.
II. The Nurse Leader's Role and Responsibility In Professional Activities
The credibility of the nursing profession as well as the patient outcomes depend on effective nursing leadership. With proper leadership, nurses can retain better staff and also provided excellent patient care.
Nursing leadership must be exhibited in all nursing roles. It may be that you are a teacher, mentor educating future nurses, a researcher, an administrator offering guidance to staff, or a practitioner providing patient care or you may be involved in policy development. Leadership in all the above-mentioned posts must be exercised for effective patient care.
Five transformational leadership practices
The following five practices signify good leadership when adhered to by the practicing nurse.
- Nurturing good relationships: In any healthy organization, trust and showing respect are key to building healthy relationships.
- Fostering empowerment in the working environment: It is essential to grow within the professional setup and, for this, learning is an important aspect. For this learning to occur there must be access to support, information, and resources. Opportunities that enhance further learning must be taken advantage of and strong networks with colleagues must be established.
- Disseminating Knowledge: It is vital to create an environment that fosters the development of knowledge and its integration. A continuous inquiry approach must be implemented as regards to practice.
- Implementing Change: It is very important in any healthy organization to embrace change whenever needed. A proactive approach needs to be taken to implement change, so that the processes involved in delivering patient care are fine tuned and resulting outcomes are improved.
- Advocating for resources: Advocating nursing resources is pivotal to deliver high-quality patient care.
Nurse leaders have excellent clinician potentials. They also have innate leadership potentials that need to be tapped appropriately in the hospital setting.
These are the five qualities a nurse leader has in professional activities;
- Self–confidence: They are in touch with the real personality within themselves and know their minds well;
- Courage: Nurse leaders take risks when wanted;
- Growth: They grow by tapping into unknown aspects of change;
- Communication: They make their thoughts well known to their peers and subordinates;
- Appreciation: They appreciate others and themselves also.
III. The Nurse Leader's Role in Maintaining Continued Competence Within The Profession
Patients, communities and families expect to be provided with competent care in the nursing sphere. It is their right too to be able to obtain such expert care from nurses. Thus, it falls as a major responsibility on the nurses to exhibit professional competency all through their career period. The relevant issues concerning nursing competencies are reviewed by the regulatory boards, the registered nurses themselves, by educators, and by state nursing associations.
Apart from regulatory bodies governing nursing competencies, it is essential that individual nurses are involved in any professional competency-based decision within their professional setup.
According to the ANA (2008), competence can be decisive and both situational and dynamic. It is both a process that is continual as well as an outcome.
The term continual competence demands lifelong learning. That is the reason competency is described as dynamic and the Registered Nurse must assess the requirement for skills, additional knowledge and growth in the personal sense (ANA, 2010).
IV. The Nurse Leader's Leadership Role Within The Profession
The healthcare system is constantly changing and nurses are responsible to respond to this scenario. Nursing leaders can be, but are not limited to, chief executives; administrators; professional practice leaders; frontline, middle and senior managers; government officials; and leaders in regulatory bodies; and policy makers. Nurses have important roles such as being a collaborator, advocate, communicator, visionary, role model, and mentor and risk taker.
Nurse leaders are proficient both clinically as well as in commonsense everyday actives. They have insight and are the ones who most often identify which areas need to improve. They do not stop with identifying but go ahead with participating in leading the change or making the improvements. They have sound knowledge subject-wise as well as enormous administration acumen. They have courage and believe in themselves and have strong personalities that make them stand out in the crowd. Younger nurses are drawn to them for guidance automatically.
V. The Nurse Leader's Role as a Professional Role Model.
Nurses are constantly watched while they work in their hospital setup. Patients, family, other nurses and students constantly observe their actions. Most often, nurses assume the role of role model and have the capacity to influence other people’s attitudes and thinking either positively or in a negative fashion.
While education constitutes theory and practice, integrating both is done though role modeling. Expert diagnostic and intervention skills are learnt by student nurses when they watch excellent role models who are nurses (Chow & Suen 2001; Belinsky & Tataronis, 2007). Thus, learning in the clinical setup is enhanced apart from high-quality patient care being delivered with nurses acting as role models. Theory learned in the classroom is translated into practice when novices watch role models nurses (Price, 2004). This knowledge imparted by the exemplary behavior of senior nurses in the clinic setup to younger nurses is called as “Craft Knowledge”.
The nurse leaders have natural mentoring abilities and are thus are informal opinion guides their peers look upon. The nurse leaders are warm, friendly, yet knowledgeable that younger nurses look out for them to seek advice professionally, clinically and sometimes even for personal reasons.
VI. Conclusion
The common problems felt in the nursing sphere are inadequate human resources for nursing, a growing demand by the ever-increasing aging population, and inadequate funding. To address these issues and to come up with suitable solutions, effective planning and implementation of appropriate nursing roles in the healthcare set up is vital. Nursing leadership should be taken seriously and the nurse leader must execute all the roles specified above to the best of their capacity to ensure effective patient care.
Professional nursing practice requires strong a constant commitment to compassion and caring, and development of self and others on a continual basis. It also requires accountability and assuming responsibility and portraying an attitude of collaboration and flexibility. It requires guiding others and being a role model and an example, showing courage and insight and taking risks by being open to change, and displaying excellent communication skills to be an efficient nurse leader in any hospital setting.
References
- American Nurses Association. (2008). Position Statements: Professional role competence. Washington, DC: Author.
- American Nurses Association. (2010). Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice, 2nd Edition. Washington, DC: Author.
- Belinsky, S., & Tataronis, G., (2007). Past experiences of the clinical instructor and current attitudes toward evaluation of students. Journal of Allied Health 36 (1), 11–17.
- Buresh, B., Gordon, S., &. Benner, P. (2006). From silence to voice: What nurses know and must communicate to the public (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Chow, F., & Suen, L., (2001). Clinical staff as mentors in preregistration undergraduate nursing education: students’ perceptions of the mentors’ roles and responsibilities. Nurse Education Today, 21, 350–358.
- Price, B., 2004. Mentoring: the key to clinical learning. Nursing Standard, 18 (52)
