Nursing

In this assignment, you will be writing a 1,000-1,250 word paper describing the differing approaches of nursing leaders and managers to issues in practice. To complete this assignment, do the following:

Select an issue from the following list: bullying, unit closers and restructuring, floating, nurse turnover, nurse staffing ratios, use of contract employees (i.e., registry and travel nurses), or magnet designation.
Describe the selected issue. Discuss how it impacts quality of care and patient safety in the setting in which it occurs.
Discuss how professional standards of practice should be demonstrated in this situation to help rectify the issue or maintain professional conduct.
Explain the differing roles of nursing leaders and nursing managers in this instance and discuss the different approaches they take to address the selected issue and promote patient safety and quality care. Support your rationale by using the theories, principles, skills, and roles of the leader versus manager described in your readings.
Discuss what additional aspects mangers and leaders would need to initiate in order to ensure professionalism throughout diverse health care settings while addressing the selected issue.
Describe a leadership style that would best address the chosen issue. Explain why this style could be successful in this setting.
Use at least three peer-reviewed journal articles other than those presented in your text or provided in the course.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

ANSWER

Nurse Turnover

Selected Issue, Setting, and Impact on Patient Safety

Nurse turnover is when nurses leave a particular organization as a nurse. Nursing turnover is associated with inadequate staffing that can lead to job burnout and among nurse practitioners (Antwi & Bowblis, 2018). Nurse turnover is a rapidly-growing human resource concern that is affecting the healthcare industry. Nurses can eave organizations because of various reasons. Personal reasons like advancing in education, pregnancy, marriage, and following a spouse can lead to nurse turnover. Nurses often receive job offers from other organizations. For this reason, a nurse can seek another organization that causes more convenience to their work environment than the current organization. When current working conditions do not favor the nurse, they may seek to either quit the profession or seek an alternative organization. Some organization does not remunerate nurses well while other do not provide them with safe and efficient working conditions. These unfavorable conditions can precipitate the nurse turnover rate.

Nurse turnover impacts patient safety in many ways. Nurses leaving organizations lead to understaffing of the key health practitioners. When only a few nurses are available to work, they cannot fully serve the patients. Some patients will go unattended to hence greatly jeopardizing their safety. The few nurses will want to work quickly to serve as many patients as possible. This leads to work overload that precipitates errors. Nurse turnover compels organizations to replace nurses with new ones who must take a longer time to get used to the operation of the organization. During this window, patients do not receive quality services like they receive when experienced nurses are on duty. Higher rates of nurse turnover have been linked to higher rates of patient mortality (Antwi & Bowblis, 2018)

Professional Standards of Practice to Rectify Issue or Maintain Professional Conduct

To reduce nurse turnover professional standards of practice must be implemented in the nursing organization. The hiring and staffing process should incorporate high-quality standards. Nurses need the required amount of professional guidance as they practice. Nurses should be guided by more experienced practitioners to stick to the standards of professional practice. There needs to careful consideration of assessment, diagnosis, outcome identification, planning, implementation, and evaluation (Polivka et al., 2014). Leadership positions should be given to experienced nurses who understand the profession deeply. This will ensure that organizations available nurses are empowered by a more professional authority that offers the best leadership as they practice. Nurse leaders should be given a bigger role in serving as a mediator between nurses and the management. The leaders should be empowered to communicate the needs of the nurses to the management and in turn, articulate the requirements of the management to the nurses in the most professional manner.

Nursing organizations can set up retention initiatives to deal with nurse turnover. Retention initiatives may incorporate measurable goals that align with the mission and vision of the organization. Retention initiatives can incorporate the requirement of the minimum that a nurse must serve in an organization before quitting. This can be established while hiring so that the nurses are aware of the situation before they sign up. Another way of guaranteeing a reduction in turnover by professional standards of practice is by ensuring that nurses provide the most professional working environment with the highest levels of motivation possible.

Differing Roles and Approaches of Nursing Leaders and Nursing Managers

Nurse managers are responsible for managing the financial resources, human resources, staff satisfaction, patient satisfaction, standard work environments, and aligning unit goals to organizational strategic goals. Nurse managers can improve the situation by increasing the financial incentives for the nurse in the organization. They perform an important role in hiring and can set promotion processes that enable nurses to rise through ranks and experience professional development. Nurse managers have more grasp of organization goals and can use this understanding to instill understanding among the nurses.

A nursing leader puts more focus on overseeing a team of nurses and directing initiatives for patient care. Nursing leaders have advanced clinical knowledge and focus more on the improvement of patient care outcomes. They also provided care directly to patients and coordinate with other nurses to offer services. While nurse managers are more focused on the administration part of nursing, nurse leaders are more concerned with the professional part and welfare of the nurse. Nursing leaders can be a perfect bridge between the administration and the nurses. Through this role, they can articulate the needs of the nurses and ensure that they are retained in the organization. Nursing leaders can also help developing nurses to understand their roles more professionally hence reduce chances of feeling out of place in the organization (Polivka et al., 2014).

Ensuring Professionalism Through Diverse Health Care Settings

Setting up a tolerable diverse health care setting is key towards attaining a high rate of nurse retention and preventing turnover. Leaders and managers should champion ethics and integrity among nurses to ensure a reduction in turnover (Pishgooie et al., 2019). There should be high levels of tolerance within the organization to ensure that all nurses feel accommodated and not discriminated against. The manager should ensure that they hire a nurse from various social-cultural backgrounds to encourage an atmosphere of diversity in the organization. Lack of diversity management in the organization can precipitate turnover when some nurses experience discrimination out of place.  Nurses should undergo regular training to learn more about how they can better discharge their duties. While professional knowledge is necessary, interpersonal skills that are often overlooked are equally important in ensuring retention. Some do not know how to effectively communicate with their colleagues or patients. Leaders and managers should organize periodical training sessions to address such pertinent issues.

Leadership Style to Address Issue

Transformational leadership is the leadership style best suited to addressing nurse turnover and reducing it significantly (Doody & Doody, 2012). Transformational leadership style gives leaders more room for identifying the concerns of their employees and seeking solutions for them. For instance, should nurses require more resources to deliver their roles effectively, transformational leadership gives room for changing the status quo and providing the nurses’ needs. If these issues involve changing some aspects of the organization, the transformational leadership style readily allows leaders to initiate transformative changes that will make employees more comfortable, productive, and willing to stay. Transformational leadership will allow nurses to think rather than just do what they are told. Nurses are given more autonomy to evaluate evidence-based approaches to providing health care to patients. This makes nurses take ownership of their practice hence giving them a reason to stay in the organization. Transformation leadership allows nurses to work in teams to provide solutions at their workplace. When an acceptable environment of collaboration is created between nurses, they will not seek to leave the organization. When nurse turnover rates are very high, the organization certainly needs to change how it manages nurses. Transformational leadership style provides the best opportunity for leaders to oversee the process of change to gain more nurse retention.

References

Antwi, Y. A., & Bowblis, J. R. (2018). The impact of nurse turnover on quality of care and          mortality in nursing homes: Evidence from the great recession. American Journal of     Health Economics, 4(2), 131-163.

Doody, O., & Doody, C. M. (2012). Transformational leadership in nursing practice. British        journal of nursing, 21(20), 1212-1218.

Pishgooie, A. H., Atashzadeh‐Shoorideh, F., Falcó‐Pegueroles, A., & Lotfi, Z. (2019).      Correlation between nursing managers’ leadership styles and nurses’ job stress and         anticipated turnover. Journal of Nursing Management, 27(3), 527-534.

Polivka, B. J., Chaudry, R. V., & Jones, A. (2014). Congruence between position descriptions for             public health nursing directors and supervisors with national professional standards and             competencies. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 20(2), 224-235.