Nursing Leadership Skills

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The registered nurse is required to demonstrate a variety of leadership skills to be an effective leader within the healthcare team. This essay will reflect upon, and critically discuss the leadership role of a Registered Nurse in ensuring the delivery of quality and safe patient care. Three essential leadership skills a Registered Nurse requires to be able to deliver effective quality and safe patient care include effective communication, patient centred care and continuous professional development. This will be shown throughout this essay by reflecting upon personal reflections, interviews from Dr Lucy Cuddihy and journal articles. Dr Lucy Cuddihy explains nursing leadership as something that can empower patients and staff, can help to influence …show more content…
This is shown when registered nurses have begun implementing a bedside handover (Bradley & Mott, 2014). This made patients feel they knew who would be looking after them, what was scheduled for the rest of the shift and allowed patients and nurses to feel as though they could discuss care more openly than once discussed (Bradley & Mott, 2014). Patient centred care is very important in delivering quality and safe patient care as a registered nurse as it is also seen to provide better health outcomes for the patient (Drach-Zahavy, 2009). Patient centred care is a key focus in artefacts and streamed videos throughout this …show more content…
This essay has discussed and critically debated the leadership role of the registered nurse in delivering quality and safe nursing care by focusing on essential leadership skills such as effective communication, patient centred care and continuous professional development. Effective communication when working positively provides the patient and their team of nurses and doctors to all be involved in the care and all have a level of understanding of expectations, wants and needs. When effective communication is not being used successfully, patients and family members may feel they are only communicated with when something really terrible is happening or they might be too afraid to ask questions. Patient centred care when working positively also allows the patient to feel part of the team, part of the decision making process, and this can be seen with the implementation of bedside handovers. Poor communication and working in unfamiliar settings/wards are both negative factors which decrease the likelihood of patient centred care being delivered effectively. Continuous professional development is seen as a positive part of delivery quality and safe care to patients as this gives the nurse the most up-to-date evidence based practice offered, thus, caring for the patient in the best way known possible. Lack of time, funding and study days leads to

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