Question

What is the role of the nursing leader in relation to being a change agent and advocating for innovation?

Why is recognizing change as a constant and supporting a trail-blazing spirit important?

Describe best practices in change theories.

Describe one strategy you would apply as a nursing leader to facilitate organizational change that is unplanned and stressful for staff members with many resistors to the change.

Explain the change process you would apply with a major planned change in the healthcare organization.

Answer 1

Nurses should be full partners, with physicians and other health professionals, in redesigning health care. Changes in nursing practice and education, strong leadership will be required to realize the vision of a transformed health care system.

Strong leadership is critical if a transformed health care system is to be realized. Yet not all nurses begin their career with thoughts of becoming a leader. The nursing profession must produce leaders throughout the health care system, from the bedside to the boardroom, who serve as full partners with other health professionals and are accountable for their own contributions to delivering quality care while working collaboratively with leaders from other health professions. Nurses need leadership skills and competencies to act as full partners to redesign and reform efforts across the health care system.

Nursing leaders must translate new research findings to environment and into nursing education and from nursing education into practice and policy. These improvements must be tested and adopted through policy changes across the health care system. A full partner involves taking responsibility for identifying problems and areas of waste, devising and implementing a plan for improvement, tracking improvement over time, and making necessary adjustments to realize established goals. Nurses should have a voice in health policy decision making, being engaged in implementation efforts related to health care reform. Nurses must build new partnerships with other clinicians, business owners, elected officials, and the public to help realize these improvements. Nurses as the health professionals should have greater influence in the critical areas of quality of patient care and safety.

How to work in teams, how to collaborate effectively within and across disciplines, the basic ethical care, how to be an effective patient advocate, theories of innovation, and the foundations for quality and safety improvement. For this collaboration is a key strategy for improving problem solving and achieving innovation in health care. Nursing researchers who have studied collaboration among health professionals define it as a communication process that innovation and advanced problem solving among people who are of different disciplines, organizational ranks, or institutional settings band together for advanced problem solving innovative solutions without regard to discipline, rank, or institutional affiliation, enact change based on a standard of care and organizational outcomes.

Boundless energy and self-motivation go hand-in-hand, and it demonstrates the enthusiasm it takes to earn their degree to drive future successes. Everyone who is successful somehow brings physical energy, emotional and spiritual energy into their environment,

Brainstorming, discussing ideas and thinking through decisions are important, but action yields results. Trailblazers consider all of the available information and then identify a time to cut bait, students face the risks of navigating their own educational journey and charting their own path for the future. Trailblazers usually have a vision, and they are willing to try different approaches to what might seem to be an obvious solution. A trailblazer typically has an entrepreneurial mindset and can sometimes find rules to be stifling, while they don’t intentionally break rules, if they know there’s a better solution, they’ll look for ways to change them.

For example to site here, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer, Steve Jobs imagined a future in which PCs would be accessible and affordable to anyone. Until his death, Jobs continually challenged the status quo with groundbreaking developments in computer graphics for the film industry, music, cellular telephones and gaming, who all hold doctoral degrees, give students an opportunity to work with leading experts in their fields who, dare to test current ways of thinking.

Trailblazers know they don’t have all the answers, but as leaders, they surround themselves with a team of experts. Most influential and skilled athletes understand that winning is not possible without teammate support. A member of the team, relies on the team, defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.

Managing change is about handling the complexity of the process. It is about evaluating, planning and implementing operations, tactics and strategies and making sure that the change is worthwhile and relevant. Managing change is a complex, dynamic and challenging process. It is never a choice between technological or people oriented solutions but a combination of all. Predictable change allows time for preparation, whereas unpredictable change is more difficult to respond. Since changes in healthcare occur so rapidly, they are less likely to be predictable. Bringing change takes time and requires the commitment of time on the part of the manager. The manager must know the values that matter and focus on changing those as opposed to reacting to every invitation for change.

Solutions are required to overcome any emerging problems due to the change that are continuing to happen. And in order to keep the organisation functioning according to plan, managers and employees’ knowledge and skills should be upgraded, necessary training on the changes in technology must be provided. Changes in healthcare practice are welcome if they improve quality and safety, or save money.

An organization must harness the forces driving transformation and use them to its advantage. The change in health services are incremental improvement on existing organizational capabilities, more empowerment to the changing agents and continuous support to the changing leaders.