LEADERSHIP AND INNOVATION IN THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM--NURSING PRACTICE

 
LEADERSHIP AND INNOVATION IN THE HEALTH CARE SYSTEM--NURSING PRACTICE

 
Table of contents

Introduction	2
Discussion	2
Transformational leadership	3
Innovation in healthcare	5
Change and Change management	6
Use of evidence to support change	9
Conclusion	10
Reference list	12
Appendix 1	15
 
Introduction
Modernization and advancements in medical science making healthcare care systems to face a large number of challenges in order to deliver cost-effective health care services. Patient’s disease acuity and rise in health care costs are some of the problems identified to be addressed.  However, it is important to improve the quality of nursing healthcare services that might result in alteration of the existing theories and models. Therefore, leadership and innovation in the healthcare system are necessary to resolve the existing health care problems with critical evaluation and design a new role for nursing professionals.  This project highlights the key decisions that affect the consequences of a patient’s lives by providing navigating nursing services.
Discussion
Leadership
Leadership is explained as a series of process that includes direction, motivation, collaboration and motivation in order to aim optimum care outcomes.  A nurse should be capable of supervising the particular field through leading patient acuity, complex environment. According to the Institute of medicine, a nurse should be eligible to lead the interprofessional team of the concerned healthcare system (Vito-Thomas et al. 2018). The nursing leadership has been proved to be effective in patient safety with directly participating in clinical care. Nursing leadership creates a vision of motivating and empowering staffs. A nursing leader is an agent who has the self-confidence of leading own team through valuing patients (Regan et al. 2016). They play a significant role in improving the health of patients and care users. The leadership phenomenon of nursing leadership reflects the general leadership style. The leadership is described as an interactive process that encourages the followers in order to accomplish nursing goals. However, leadership is not confined to higher management levels, instead, this serves as a discipline that every nurse need to follow.
The nurse leadership skills concentrate on the patient and the entire nursing team who advocates patient through effective communication and formal leadership position (McGilton, et al. 2016). The profession is autonomous which requires the nurses to make decisions of taking responsibility for their tasks. The nurses make and grant the decisions that help them forming the foundations of leadership. The availability of multiple resources increased the interest at the level of clinical settings. A nurse playing the role of a good leader participates in effective communication among different healthcare disciplines ensuring the continuous patient pace. Nursing leadership concentrates on patient and healthcare team rather putting effort on a formal position of leadership. The identified characteristics of leadership that a registered nurse should possess are
●	Clinical expertise
●	Collaboration
●	Interpersonal understanding
●	Effective communication
●	Coordination
These traits are desired in a clinical leader in order to gain expertise in healthcare so that the leader can empower making, make a clear vision and provide knowledgeable guidance to patient and families (Saugel et al. 2017).
The two leadership theories identified for nurses and applicable in the healthcare industry are as follows
Transformational leadership
Transformational leadership theory is identified as a relation between a follower and his leader where they motivate and encourage each other resulting in the formation of system congruence between the two (Harris & Mayo, 2018). The two traits that are common among the transformational leader are personality and strong vision. Transformational leaders encourage the followers in adjusting their expectations, inspiration and opinion to achieve common objectives. There are four factors that frame the transformational leadership style.
●	Ideal impact
●	Strong motivation
●	Intellectual stimulation
●	Participative leadership
The transformational leadership theory aims to bring a change in the healthcare system. For example, there are many practices that might result in an adverse effect on the patient. Intensive care unit nurses change catheter of the patients that make acquiring urinary tract infection (Gorski, 2017). Therefore, the function of a transformational leader is to modify the catheter changing practice so that there is least chance for the patient to acquire any hospital infection.
Strengths
The transformational leadership theory focuses to introduce a new change by utilizing the style as changing agents who utilize the qualities to encourage the followers achieving the goals by empowering other staffs and sharing the common vision with