Today, effective personal leadership is crucial in improving the quality of care and patient outcomes. Leadership is one of the critical elements that help to determine the clinical organization’s overall outcome. However, effective leaders should be able to have a self-assessment to determine their strengths and weaknesses to improve patient outcomes by dealing with the results efficiently. Also, self-assessment for leaders serves as a source of motivation which equally improves the organization’s success in a specific project. In addition, The Quality safety education for Nurses principles such as quality improvements and patient-centered care also play an important in improving the patient outcome. Thus, clinical organizations need to determine whether the leadership styles, theories, and skills affect the patient outcome negatively or positively.
Self-Assessment
The self-assessment offers reflective queries that enable leaders to identify both the strengths and weaknesses to improve patient outcomes. Through the queries, the leaders in a clinical organization can track the areas in their leadership that require improvement. Also, self-assessment helps in promoting self-awareness through the different queries. Due to these benefits of self-assessment, it is evident that it impacts the patient outcome positively. For instance, a self-assessment can lead to overall success in an organization by helping leaders grow in the few areas they feel needs improvements and putting more effort into them. When the leaders improve on their weaknesses, this reflects on the entire organization’s success. However, in comparison to others, inspirational leaders are likely to gain more acceptance in a clinical organization.
Additionally, self-assessment on the weaknesses and strengths serves as a source of motivation for leaders. This is because self-assessment helps them track their progress with time in the organization. Self-motivation comes from the progress they have made in the organization considering their target and date for completing a certain project. Consequently, the leaders’ lack of motivation affects their performance and the entire organization, which equally affects the patient outcome. Also, through the self-assessment, leaders are able to motivate their team members by creating favorable working conditions for them as a way of improving. Further, research indicates that effective leadership improves patient outcomes (Wong & Cummings, 2007). Thus, self-assessment to determine the weaknesses or areas of improvement as a leader is one necessary aspect in improving the patient outcome.
Leadership Theory
Contingency theory
Contingency theory suggest that a leader can be effective in one part and not in another part due to the difference in situations. Since leadership styles in a clinical organization are meant to improve patient outcomes, this theory focuses on how different situations might affect the leaders’ effectiveness. Also, according to contingency theory, the leader’s effectiveness depends on whether their leadership style suits the clinical organization for a particular situation. Thus, to maximize the probability of effectively improving the patient outcome in the organization using this leadership theory, it suggests that one should examine each situation to know whether the leadership style is going to be effective or not. In addition, through the self-assessment, one is able to monitor whether their leadership style is effective towards the achievement of the organization’s overall goal of improving patient outcomes. However, the theory is impacted by employee morale, standards for behaviors, work pace, management style, etc.
Quality Safety Education for Nurses
The principle of ‘patient-centered care’ helps recognize the patients as the major source of control in health care services. The principle provides the basis for elements such as providing compassionate and coordinated care to improve the patient’s needs effectively (Delaney, 2018). By recognizing the patient’s source of control, a nurse can respect their needs and values. Other sub-elements of ‘patient-centered care’ include access to care, emotional support to the patient, providing information. This principle helps engage the patient more in the process of care and improve their health outcomes.
Quality improvements principle entails changing the health care to improve the patient outcome through high-quality care. Since the patient outcome may be affected in some cases, this principle ensures that the necessary steps to improve the health care system are put in place to improve the patient outcomes.
Comparison between Leadership and Management
Both management’s and leadership’s skills differ on their purposes in a clinical organization. For instance, the management skills in a clinical organization are used to plan and build the clinical organization’s systems to provide quality health care and improve patient outcomes. On the other hand, leadership skills in a clinical organization are used to align, motivate and inspire health care providers towards a common goal of improving patient outcomes. On the positive part, both management and leadership improve the organization’s performance since they work together in most projects. In addition, those with management and leadership roles can understand how the teams work and use these tactics to improve patient outcomes. Thus, effective collaboration between the two is important in improving the performance of a clinical organization.
Applying Week One Concepts
The contingency theory of leadership concepts can be applied in a workplace. Considering leaders’ effectiveness is impacted with different variables, unique leadership styles would serve as an effective response to the challenging variables. For instance, the dozen of factors that affect the leaders’ effectiveness include the team size, the scope of the project, and perhaps the date for delivering the results. In the workplace, leaders must acknowledge that their success in delivering quality care to patients depends on the situations and their skills. Thus, to improve patient outcomes, the supervisors and the managers need to adopt a leadership style corresponding to the current situation at the hospital. For instance, in some cases, the leaders can delegate their responsibilities to a coworker depending on their situation.
Conclusion
The leadership styles, theories, and skills impact the patient outcome positively. Leadership theories such as contingency are important in workplaces since they help leaders to improve patient outcomes by focusing on the present circumstance. Apart from the leadership theory, leaders’ self-assessment also plays an important role in patient outcome. Most of the time, self-assessment act as a source of motivation for leaders to address their areas of weakness which improves the patients’ outcome in one way or another. In addition, quality safety principles such as quality improvements and patient-centered care are also important in improving patient care. Generally, improving patient outcomes requires collaboration from all the members of a clinical organization.
References
Delaney, L. J. (2018). Patient-centred care as an approach to improving health care in Australia. Collegian, 25(1), 119-123.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1322769617300422
Wong, C. A., & Cummings, G. G. (2007). The relationship between nursing leadership and patient outcomes: a systematic review. Journal of nursing management, 15(5), 508-521.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2834.2007.00723.x
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