The leadership vision is transformative and adaptive to ensure that hospitals and healthcare systems are sustainable in the rapidly changing landscape of healthcare delivery. As such, nurse leaders must continuously develop their competencies in order to thrive in such an environment. The leadership vision reflects collaborative processes, boundary spanning in practices, and talent transformation to meet new demands and account for the shortage of nurses and specialists.
This presentation covers the leadership vision nursing informatics issue of nurse shortage. It is observed that the US healthcare system continues to run in a rapidly challenging and fragmented environment, which is becoming even more complex due to ongoing healthcare reforms and market dynamics. Hence, healthcare management and delivery have changed significantly. Nurse leaders must learn to leverage expertise across different settings as they strive to develop new collaborative groups to integrate knowledge, anticipate and offer solutions to nursing challenges while providing efficient, high-quality, compassionate care to all stakeholders.
Leadership vision based on promoting enhanced nurse collaboration, supporting talent transformation among nurses, boundary spanning, and resource stewardship among others can advance service delivery. These visions are based on the transformational leadership (Curtis, de Vries, & Sheerin, 2011).
Nursing informatics, which is the science and practice of integrating nursing, its expertise, and knowledge with the management of information and communication technologies to enhance healthcare delivery, is relatively a new field and care practice. As such, it experiences a shortage of nurses – a problem that is widespread in the US. The noted nursing shortage generally affects the quality of care negatively.
Nursing informatics is generally regarded as a new field of specialization for nurse graduates. In the recent past, it has gained widespread recognition as healthcare facilities rush to implement HITECH (Cooper & Hamer, 2012). However, few graduates are available to fill up these positions. Healthcare facilities have created new positions such as Chief Nursing Information Officer, clinical analysts, and informatics nurses. In fact, most healthcare organizations have had trouble with the recruitment, selection, and retention of nursing informatics specialists.
Nursing informatics specialists are not common. In fact, the issue of nurse staff shortage in the US has become critical, and specialized positions are not left behind. In fact, clinical analysts and informatics nurses are difficult to recruit and retain such nurses. As such, hospitals scramble for such nurse specialists to meet the current shortage.
It is generally acknowledged that nursing informatics specialists have a high degree of impact on the quality of care (Darvish, Bahramnezhad, Keyhanian, & Navidhamidi, 2014). Shortage of such specialists has led to poor outcomes in workflow, user acceptance, and patient safety. Studies have established that alarm fatigue associated with adverse impacts on both patients and nurses was associated with poor workflow management. Hospitals with a shortage of nurse informatics specialists experienced more cases of alarm fatigue.
Nurses can only thrive well under effective leadership provided by nurse leaders and administrators. In this regard, leadership vision for the future should develop and initiate leadership approaches that systematically focus on priorities, and leadership practices required to attain organizational goals while adapting to rapid changes that drive them (Read & Laschinger, 2015). This leadership vision can help to reduce the shortage of nursing informatics specialists in hospitals.
The overall impact of leadership vision is to ensure adequate nursing informatics specialists at the hospitals. Nurse specialists are known for their high degree of impact on the quality of care. More specifically, nursing informatics specialists were seen as most important during program implementation and optimization of phases to improve clinical workflow processes. As such, informatics nurses played critical roles in improving workflow, patient safety, quality of care and end-user acceptance (Hunter, 2014).
Leadership strategies, including collaborative practices, talent transformation, and boundary spanning should address the current nurse informatics shortage. These strategies are based on core principles of transformative leadership, but they introduce the concept of adaptive to guide nurses on rapid changes in the healthcare landscape. Nurse leaders should therefore become educators to drive the leadership vision (Stutsky & Laschinger, 2014).
A collaborative strategy is based on daily team effectiveness to reduce negative impacts on nursing informatics specialists. In this case, nurses, physicians and other care providers will have a shared vision of patient care driven by effective communication, an environment that drives learning agility and adaptive processes (Martin, McCormack, Fitzsimons, & Spirig, 2014). In addition, it will enhance collaborative problem solving and decision-making with all stakeholders involved in care provision.
The leadership vision and practice should aim to develop a larger talent pool of nursing informatics specialists beyond the normal traditional source of healthcare specialists given the low enrolments and supplies of such specialists. It will ensure that a new leadership strategy is defined to enhance reforms that reflect new structures in healthcare delivery systems while promoting nurse learning (Hunter, 2014). In addition, the leadership vision will identify, nurture, and retain the necessary talents and leadership required to develop and implement effective solutions in nursing informatics in the face of rapid changes. Besides, it will promote a culture of value creation and professional practice.
The leadership strategy recognizes that a single hospital may have a hierarchy, several departments, and a wide range of service lines. The leadership practices will assess, expand and leverage strategic organizational networks to develop solutions for nursing informatics issues. Besides, it will rely on unique attributes on nurse staff to drive innovation while developing practical approaches, such as IT implementation to overcome nurse burnout and to enhance communication (Cook et al., 2014), for sustainable change focusing on assisting senior nurses to acquire new skills (Cooper & Hamer, 2012).
Collaborative practices effectiveness is demonstrated when nurses in a large healthcare setting work together across all levels of care provision to implement Electronic Health Record (HER) (Johnson, 2014). Outcomes from such efforts help in streamlining workflow to improve healthcare provision.
Nurses can use EHR to improve patient safety, cut costs of training, as well healthcare costs. Nurse leaders must assess skills gaps and develop appropriate techniques to ensure that nurses acquire the required knowledge and skills for EHR (Miller et al., 2014). A talent transformation is demonstrated by the case of Kathleen Hunter (Hunter, 2014).
Effective nurse leadership has empowered nurses through supportive work environments that encourage delivering beyond departmental layers and various service lines. Consequently, a significant number of nurses are retained (Read & Laschinger, 2015). In addition, it is useful when resources are scarce in a facility.
Effective leadership strategies based on a shared leadership vision can transform an organization and ensure high-quality healthcare services (Martin et al., 2014). In this case, leadership strategies adopted will assist in developing and equipping nurses with transformative skills for improved practices. Evaluation of these strategies will reflect a shared vision for change, enhanced nurse collaboration in the entire facility, increased nurse involvement and motivation, nurse learning and retention, and the development of new models for service delivery.
The nursing profession continues to face several challenges, including a shortage of specialized nurses, such as nursing informatics specialists and clinical analysts. These challenges have adverse effects on healthcare outcomes. Effective leadership vision and leadership strategies are considered as appropriate measures to lead nursing into the future amidst challenges. Transformative, adaptive leadership supported with specific collaborative, talent transformation, and boundary spanning strategies can help nurse leaders to develop functional organizations that are resilient to the noted disruptions.
Reference
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