Introduction to Leadership in Nursing: New Roles in Changing Healthcare Arena

Healthcare has been in transformation over time in an attempt to solve problems such as access issues, cost problems and disparity in provision. To improve the quality of service offered even with the challenges facing the healthcare system, there has been the development of new roles to cover different specialties. The roles include the nurse navigator, the clinical nurse leader and the leaders in patient-centered care. Nurse navigation programs offer services to oncology patients in their journey through diagnosis and treatment. The clinical nurse leaders, on the other hand, are responsible for the services offered at the point of care to families and patients. Leaders in patient-centered care are responsible for the transfer of focus in treatment to patient needs. The development of these new roles in the healthcare sector can be attributed to the principles of continuous quality improvement and the process of quality planning, improvement and control. Furthermore, the roles can describe the meaning of teamwork with respect to the healthcare system.

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Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and New Roles in Healthcare.

CQI is a management practice that involves the improvement of health infrastructure and personnel. Quality improvement is effective if there are structural and administrative efforts to improve the standards of healthcare delivery constantly. In effect, the team members have to assess their current situation and then proceed to benchmark it against better standards to identify the possibility of improvement. According to Johnson & Sollecito (2018), continuous quality improvement is achieved by the progression of services offered to the patent, the practice and the general populace (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018). The purpose of the application of CQI in healthcare is the optimization of the quality of care and at the same time managing the cost while improving the customer service quality.

CQI is a broad area of application that involves the use of outlined principles in all the hospital services. The four key principles involved in this process include working as a singular system with key processes, patient focus, focus on data use and focus on care-coordination. For CQI to be applied, there has to be a system of care that providers to adhere to, including key processes (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018). In an effort to improve the quality of services offered in the healthcare system, there has been the development of new roles such as the nurse navigators, clinical nurse leaders and leaders in patient-centered care. These roles fit in the CQI principles as they are patient-focused, they are applied in accordance with the healthcare system, and they are applied in a coordinated manner (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018).

The nurse navigators are responsible for the guidance of the cancer patients in the process of diagnosis and treatment. The nurse navigators provide the guidance, education, liaison and coordination in the treatment, follow-up and critical support to the patent and the family. The nurse navigation department is intended to improve the care of patients who have cancer and therefore improving the quality of service (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018). The nurse navigators, therefore, have an important role in providing care that meets the specific need of the patients and thereby satisfying the client focus principle of CQI (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018). In comparison, the clinical nurse leaders are registered nurses that provide care at the point of treatment. A clinical nurse leader has the necessary training to provide care in bedside treatment and at the same time, is competent enough to provide complicated data-driven modern healthcare delivery organizations. Therefore, this role satisfies the CQI principle of systematic application of data that analyzes the nursing processes, identification of problems and improvement of service delivery (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018). The leaders in patient-centered care continually find ways to turn the focus of treatment to the patient. Not only does this increase the efficacy of the services offered, but it also satisfies the principle of teamwork that targets the application of service delivered in a coordinated manner. Therefore, the development of new roles in the nursing field aids in the realization of continuous quality improvement (Johnson & Sollecito, 2018).

Teamwork in Healthcare and New Roles.

In healthcare, teamwork occurs to ensure that there is the achievement of a common goal. The goal that healthcare strives to achieve is the realization of efficient and quality healthcare. The collaboration among healthcare workers and improved communication among them fuels the multidisciplinary provision of healthcare and therefore improving patient care (Rosen et al., 2018). In nursing leadership, there have been efforts to improve the delivery of these services, and therefore new roles have developed that foster communication among the various professionals and thereby ensuring that there is the provision of quality services to the patients.

Oncology patients receive treatment from several medical professionals, and therefore there has to be open communication between them. A nurse navigator occupies a unique but relatively new role in the care of the patient and therefore, they need to learn the skills and needs of a participating in a team (Rosen et al., 2018). The care is focused on the patient, and therefore there have to be coordination efforts for the patient to trust the healthcare providers. There has to be the identification of the roles of each of the medical practitioners and especially the nurse navigators, and this is to avoid the occurrence of power struggles. This process is referred to as role delineation.

Role delineation is facilitated by the creation of professional boundaries by the participants. The success of the healthcare delivery, especially in the bedside, will require the competency of the clinical nurse leaders as well as effective integration with the physicians and other healthcare team members (Rosen et al., 2018). As clinical nurse leaders design, evaluate and implement bedside care, they will have to apply principles of teamwork that include the provision of open communication and collaboration in decisions.

Ultimately, the leaders in patient-centered care will need the ethos of healthcare teamwork the most as they aspire to improve patient-focused care. Patient-focused care can only be achieved when all the members of the healthcare team are on board regarding the requirements and the means of patient care (Rosen et al., 2018). The leaders of patient-centered care will achieve their target through team-based cross-disciplinary care and open communication between team members.

Conclusion.

The new roles in the changing healthcare arena mean that nurses are required to specialize in new roles. These roles require the application of specific skills, and thereby there is specialized training for the nurses. These new roles include the nurse navigators, the clinical nurse leaders and the leaders in patient-centered care. The people in these roles satisfy various nursing competencies, including teamwork in healthcare and continuous quality improvement. The new roles apply in the implementation of the principles of CQI and on top of that, require the principles of teamwork for their success.

References

Johnson, J. K., & Sollecito, W. A. (2018). McLaughlin & Kaluzny's Continuous Quality Improvement in Health Care. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Rosen, M. A., DiazGranados, D., Dietz, A. S., Benishek, L. E., Thompson, D., Pronovost, P. J., & Weaver, S. J. (2018). Teamwork in healthcare: Key discoveries enabling safer, high-quality care. American Psychologist, 73(4), 433.