Introduction
Leadership is a necessity in any social setup and is more specialized when it comes to the medical setup. This is because it involves various parties, ranging from doctors, nurses, patients, staff and other people within the system. However, nursing leadership stands out as specialized because of the need to have a sense of direction. Leadership in nursing involves the issue of influencing and making people follow instruction as well as adhere to authority and set up social control systems. In this paper, there will be a detailed discussion about nursing leadership, personal perceptions on the values and beliefs about nursing, vision for nursing leadership, the ideal situation of what nursing should be as well as personal mandate for personal leadership. This will involve ways of ensuring and promoting nursing leadership including development of leadership skills as a leader. This will cover a general aspect of nursing leadership to help create a relationship between personal views on nursing leadership and existing literature about leadership in nursing.
Values/Beliefs bout Nursing Leadership
My values and beliefs about nursing leadership revolve around the aspect of having an all-inclusive system that encompasses patients, fellow nurses to doctors and everyone in the medical fraternity. Although it might be similar with other leadership values and beliefs in other sectors, nursing leadership according to me is more specialized because of the nature of the profession. Most workplaces and organizations are very interdependent and therefore, participants are rarely able to act independently and many of their co-workers are able to stop or at least slow down decisions or actions that are unilateral. The people that nurses interact with often have different demands and ae always looking up to the nurses for help. They put full confidence on nurses that they will be healed and be well again (Ellis & Abbott, 2013). Holding a leadership position as a nurse, it is essential to be critical and aware of the different leadership styles and methods to administer a population with diverse needs in order to cover their expectations of fulfill to a satisfactory level (Cutcliffe & Cleary, 2015). Additionally, nursing values should be ethical in the sense that the sort of leadership model chosen should not be harmful to the environment, which is composed of patients and nurses who are being led.
Nurses, just like patients need to feel safe within the nursing environment and it is the duty of the nurse to engage in values and practices that bestow a healthy safe feeling. Ethical measures are always mandatory with nurses taking the medical oath, which involves leadership aspects of being fair to patients and to fellow nurses and those in the medical fraternity. The medical oath is in often cases taken as a granted recitation without understanding it deeply and the values and responsibilities it holds to the nurses as leaders in the medical field (Steele, 2005). Another personal belief is that at all times, nurses should maintain the health standards and work on a scale to make it better every day through research and experiments. This not only increases knowledge but also equips the nurse with the necessary skills to handle any situation, within or outside the hospital environment because it helps one develop a critical mind.
Related literature on nursing leadership also revolves around the importance of setting up ethical and moral boundaries about nursing practice within the workplace. The nursing station should be a site of example in which any patient can get help from it without any strain, because nurses are meant to make the patients feel homely (Ellis & Abbott, 2013). From this perspective, nurses ought to be the masters of the profession and understand the importance of addressing medical needs to patients without delaying, whether it is a critical or mild case and to pay attention to the fellow nurses who are under the leadership spectrum. This is well linked my belief that nurses should instill confidence to themselves first through on-point leadership practices and to patients as well, regardless of the difference on their health needs, which sometimes turns out to be so demanding and wearing to the nurses. In the medical context as leaders, nurses bear the responsibility of leading fellow nurses towards a situation which is satisfactory to the patients regardless of their backgrounds, social class, race or financial ability because health is perceived to be the paramount factor (Shirey, 2013). This links directly with the belief on how the medical oath should be considered. It should be more practical rather than just theoretical by reciting it for the sake of competing the nursing college. The oath taken by nurses makes them leaders because they have to make choices that have a huge impact on the way they treat themselves as colleagues and the patients, whom they are obliged to serve.
Visions for Nursing Leadership
Nursing leadership should be a social aspect because the highest interactive population that nurses and medics come around with, are patients and their fellow workmates at the work station. While different roles come with the authority to make different types of decisions, the quality of your decisions, the processes you use to make decisions and how you communicate your decisions are important for how effective you are in your role. From a personal perspective, the vision of any nurse is to engage in the necessary decisions that will create a breakthrough and fulfill personal aspirations as well as meeting the needs of other people. From this aspect, I believe nursing leadership has to work with some form of motivation, derived from decisions made by the leadership. The motivation to lead and work as a nurse is derived from the urge to deliver quality healthcare, which is achieved through regular training and development programs (Frederick, 2014). This will nurture the nurses, not only in terms of their profession but also create a model that the nurses can use to apply in future when they become senior nurses or occupy some leadership posts, within or outside the medical environment.
The value of ethical considerations within the working environment should also create a vision of moral good, where goodness and badness are expected to be reciprocated in the same manner in future. In nursing leadership, the vision should be to do good to all human beings in the capacity as a medical nurse because human beings have networks that are interrelated (Gottlieb et al, 2012). Additionally, the social system has a way of paying back good for good and vice versa. In an ideal environment, nursing leadership should be the yardstick of all other professions because of its nature. This comes from the aspect that nursing is more objective rather than subjective. It focuses on specific components of the healthcare system rather than generalizing it (Nelson & Pilon, 2015). Therefore, it is more specific and relational to addressing both current and future needs of the medical sector. This makes it stand out and from the value of practicing the medical oath, nurses have a responsibility to make their environment sustainable and continuous.
Existing literature on visionary nursing leadership argues that it is important for nurses to understand their potential and use it in changing the culture of the organization towards a favorable one. Although it is difficult to change an organization’s culture, when this culture no longer helps the organization to be effective, the leader or leadership team needs to focus on what the desired culture should be and how to move toward this culture. Therefore, this links with what I believe about visionary leadership in the nursing profession. Before one sets to achieve anything, there should be a masterplan that will guide the various leadership process as well as inform on what decisions to be made in case of which circumstances, the most appropriate method to use in different situations as well as different ways of handling both medical and social situations that will be present in the nursing profession (McCloughan et al, 2011). Leadership in nursing should not be strenuous but enjoyable, which is only achievable the nurse understands that the future of the career lies in the hands that are used to treat. This links with my belief on what the medical oath should entail in making a nurse responsible for anything happening around the medical environment.
Mandates for Nursing Leadership
Nursing leadership should be set on specific accepted principles which act as standards of measure to ensure that nursing achieves its goals and objectives regardless of the medical environment. A nurse practitioner in a small primary health care organization is accountable for meeting the needs of clients while using diagnostic equipment and supplies appropriately. I believe that established standards will help guide new entrants and old members on better ways of leading people especially in a medical context where people have variated needs that have to be met. Additionally, a code of ethics is also necessary to be a yardstick and guide on the nature of boundaries that exist within the nursing practice (Nelson & Pilon, 2015). The code of ethics in this case acts as a watchdog to ensure that all due processes are followed and that medical ethics are adhered to. When making decisions as a leader, there should be the conception that it is either the decision yields positive results or negative results, which too have their own consequences (Ellis & Abbott, 2013). Additionally, there has to exists those against and those for some decisions made within this leadership context. Therefore, it is the duty of the nurse leader to understand the environment before making decisions.
I will promote nursing leadership as part of my mandate by exploring the various relevant methods that can make the aspect of leadership under the nursing context much more effective efficient. This will involve developing ways that meet the demands of those who are being led as well as the leaders. Leadership methods applied in the nursing leadership context should be consistent and on point to meet the demands of those being led (Cutcliffe & Cleary, 2015). This will add to the existing literature and theory of knowledge about leadership models in the nursing field. I would also improve the leadership structures that have been adopted by different nursing facilities from being bureaucratic to more of democratization. A democratic structure of leadership has more involvement and decisions made are well informed. The aim is to create a self-sustaining system that offers efficient leadership for the nurses and patients (Gottlieb et al, 2012). This is only achievable if the entire healthcare system is self-sustaining, which is possible through engaging all parties in the decision-making and implementation processes of health policies.
Nurses have a command in their own environments by virtue of their profession. Logistical nursing decision-making generates directions on staffing for a team or unit within an organization. Skills development in nursing will entail understanding personal attributes and using them with the available resources to accomplish something with the intention of creating capacity (Ellis & Abbott, 2013). From this aspect, it directly relates with my personal values and beliefs in that it is important to capacitate nurses, whether they are new in the profession or they have been there for some time.
Conclusion
Nursing leadership entails aspects that are based on the understanding of personal desires and the expectations of those being led. From personal values and beliefs, nursing leadership has a direct relationship with visions of the organization. Additionally, one has the mandate to create and provide nursing leadership skills and techniques. This is meant to improve the entire health sector in reaching out its services to patients who need them. Nursing leadership should be able to capacitate the nurses, medics as well as patients within the hospital setting and the outside environment that is full of social factors.
References
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