Introduction
Healthcare systems function as collaborative settings where the effectiveness of leadership impacts the nursing staff’s performance, which ultimately translates to patient outcomes. In such a manner, to ensure that the quality of care is sufficient, nursing leaders should work toward employee advocacy to facilitate their work opportunities. This paper explores the particularities of nurse leaders’ advocacy for nurses and its consecutive impact on patient outcomes to claim that both individual and team-based needs of the nursing staff must be met through advocacy.
Discussion
Leaders in the healthcare setting are the drivers of change in the workplace. In this regard, their roles as employees’ advocates are manifested through addressing teams’ and individual performance and needs related to care. Indeed, at the individual level, nurse leaders advocate for their employees “to operationalize CDC guidelines and support, protect, educate, and empower staff” (Stamps et al., 2021, p. 159). Moreover, nurse leaders’ advocacy entails “the protection of resources that are significant to staff, including education assistance, shared governance, and staffing models” to ensure a favorable work environment and culture (Bergstedt & Wei, 2020, p. 50). At the team level, leaders should promote employee rights and ensure their opportunities by advocating for organizational values in teams and proper patient outcomes.
Conclusion
In such a manner, it is evident that advocacy for employees enables nursing staff to perform in better-equipped, safer, and more professionally engaging environments, which allows for providing a higher quality of care to patients. Through advocacy efforts, leaders promote essential values, performance excellence, and reliability of a healthcare facility as a collaborative entity. Ultimately, engagement, support, and striving for excellence enable the implementation of high-standard care for the served populations of patients.
References
Bergstedt, K., & Wei, H. (2020). Leadership strategies to promote frontline nursing staff engagement. Nursing Management, 51(2), 48-53.
Stamps, D. C., Foley, S. M., Gales, J., Lovetro, C., Alley, R., Opett, K., Glessner, T., & Faggiano, S. (2021). Nurse leaders advocate for nurses across a health care system: COVID-19. Nurse Leader, 19(2), 159-164.