Nurses hold an integral part in the society and their leadership is crucial in determining the extent of healthcare provision. In their course, nurses face various new challenges which become easy to move out of their path. Further, the risk of being comfortable with current positions in leadership becomes a reality which can hinder the progress of healthcare. What can be done to ensure a turnaround? Below are the measures that can be taken to ensure nurses use their leadership to improve health care.
Strengthening Leadership Skills
Nurses often met with obstacles that prevent them from being significant in policy making yet opinion leaders consider them as a credible and trusted source of information on healthcare. Policy making is essential in improving healthcare hence nurses should embrace their key competencies in this process. Moreover, they should engage cohesively in the whole process and act as advisory in the policy-making boards. This is possible through active patient advocacy, working in a team and consistently improving knowledge of healthcare delivery system.
Administrative Duties
Another great way to strengthen your leadership skills is to take on administrative duties. This would be something like running a hospital for example. Running a hospital is so much more than just about knowing the medicine. It means learning how to work with and manage people in many different roles who have varying personalities. It also means knowing when to and when not to make certain calls when it comes to patient care. In other words, when and when not to authorize various kinds of treatment. You would also have to learn how to manage the finances of the hospital as well. The better administrator you can be, then the more opportunities will hopefully be created whether you a managing a certain department or the entire hospital.
Become an Innovator
Keep in mind that you do not have to be a doctor or a nurse in order to take health care to the next level. You just have to be willing to be innovative and to be a leader in your respective field. This could mean a lot of different things too. For example, one of the things you can do to become an innovator is become a pharmacist. This is not the pharmacist in the sense of working at a pharmacy, but more of in the research and development sense. You could research different kinds of compounds and chemicals and hopefully form new medicines that would benefit patients greatly. You may even be able to discover cures for various types of diseases with the way science and technology are moving today. This could help you be a leader in not just health care, but in science as well.
Furthering Your Education
Just because you may specialize in one area of health care doesn’t mean you should stop there. In fact you should continue to push the envelope by learning different aspects of the field. This does not mean you have to specialize in every role that you have some interest in, but it may give you a fresh perspective on how each area works. With this perspective, you may be able to use your leadership skills and some innovative ideas to make improvements in that area. Furthering your education doesn’t necessarily mean going back to school either. It could mean just taking a class or two or it could be as simple as doing some shadowing of other departments.
Embracing Diversity
For nurses to take healthcare to the next level, they need to embrace diversity by fostering a collaborative environment. It will not only drive innovation, but it will also solve problems among people of various institutional affiliations, ranks and disciplines. In this case, the DNP nursing doctors should be part of the collaboration.
Understanding the Dynamics of the Practice over Time
Just like any other field, some changes may occur with time. Change can be useful by passing it along where the new and inexperienced nurses learn of the healthcare dynamics. Change can be passed through chat rooms such as WhatsApp, informative blogs and Facebook. As part of the momentum, nurses in leadership need to embrace an entrepreneurial culture and expand entrepreneurial networks that could exist in education and training as well as coaching new entrants in the market.
To take healthcare to the next level, nurses should master the leadership skill over time by offering their students knowledge and practices that apply to the profession. For the students in the field, there should be a desire to take the best practices in the field. Mentorship at an early stage will also go a long way in nurturing a breed of leaders who will take healthcare to the next level. Mentorship should not just be a students’ affair, but every nurse needs to have someone more experienced as a mentor.