As a nurse leader, one must embrace a variety of nuances and unique aspects of the target setting while also building a strong value-driven decision-making framework and controlling the quality of care. Furthermore, the financial aspect of healthcare needs to be recognized as one of the critical components of proper nursing leadership. Therefore, a complex approach to controlling and navigating the target environment is required. By incorporating a leadership framework that implies motivating nurses and promoting patient-oriented values along with independent decision-making, one will achieve significant improvements in the quality of care.
Balancing the fiscal sustainability of an organization with patients’ needs represents one of the core tasks that a nurse leader must meet. For this purpose, introducing a cost-efficient approach allowing the facility to use cheaper resources while offering the required services should be considered. Furthermore, though the opportunities for increasing access to healthcare and the relevant resources have been expanded recently, a range of populations remain underserviced, and a significant number of resources remain scarce (Scott et al., 2019). Therefore, the concept of rationing must be included into the healthcare setting as the means of allocating available resources and medication in the manner that will meet the needs of vulnerable groups first, while ensuring that health issues are addressed in all members of the target community. For this reason, the importance of rationing must be acknowledged as a part of the healthcare process. However, rationing is fraught with numerous ethical issues, the main one being the necessity to prioritizing specific population groups when allocating resources. In some cases, the choice may be obvious, yet in multiple cases, two equally vulnerable groups require resources that are quite scarce.
Making decisions in a nursing setting requires being particularly wary of essential factors affecting the outcomes of the process of care. Therefore, the factors that may affect a nurse’s choice in the workplace environment may be quite varied. However, the core factors determining nursing choices in the specified context can be narrowed down to several external and internal concerns. Specifically, the external issues that drive my decision-making as a nurse in the healthcare context include patents’ personal characteristics, their immediate needs, nursing standards, and the available resources (Scott et al., 2019). Specifically, as a nurse, I always consider communicating with the rest o staff members, evaluating the essential characteristics of the target environment, and determining likely outcomes prior to taking a specific step in the target setting.
Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that, as a nurse, one should not prioritize the needs of one population over another in the traditional meaning of the specified expression Specifically, while a nurse may choose to cater to the demands of a specific group at a particular point in time due the presence of the circumstances that place the group in question at particularly high risk of a fatal outcome or a treatment failure, a nurse must ensure that the needs of other patents are also met. Therefore, the scenario in question can be approached with the help of the Utilitarian ethical approach rater effectively (Zhu et al., 2019). Namely, by detailing the available solutions and the effects that they will have on stakeholders in question, primarily, patients, nurse leaders will need to select the options that lead to the best patient outcomes, while not affecting the nursing staff negatively.
Additionally, internal concerns associated with the nursing practice must also define the choice of appropriate nursing strategies. For instance, the extent of staffing levels serves as an important characteristic that defines the range of options for healthcare services that a nursing facility can provide. Specifically, wit is critical for a healthcare organization to maintain reasonable nurse-to-patient ratio so that staff members could offer each patient a reasonable amount of attention and cater to their specific needs. In turn, once the nurse-to-patient ratio drops drastically, a nurse becomes incapable of managing the needs of each patient individually, which leads to a drop in quality (Zhu et al., 2019). Therefore, introducing tools for managing the nurse-to-patient ratio should be seen as a vital step in ensuring that the quality of care remains consistent.
Furthermore, the extent of motivation and empathy in nurses should be seen as a critical internal factor shaping the outcomes of the introduced interventions to a tremendous extent. Motivation will help nurses remain driven and engaged in the process of managing patients’ needs, whereas empathy will help the nursing staff deliver the necessary services and medications in a sensitive and respectful manner. The specified factor contributes to recognizing patient dignity and autonomy, which constitute some of the core principles of nursing ethics (Sperling, 2021). Therefore, it is vital for a nursing leader to maintain motivation and empathy in staff members. The specified goal can be met by maintaining the relevant values as the basis for decision-making in the nursing context, therefore, creating premises of effective treatment.
In turn, the process of gaining information required for decision-making in the nursing environment demands that core information should be retrieved from patients specifically. Therefore, evidence-based data collection using innovative techniques, such as social media and workplace networks, in order to build an image of an effective worker. In other words, evidence-based information will allow me to recognize the key characteristics of the patients’ conditions, as well as the changes in their well-being. The specified information will inform my decision-making in terms of the treatment options, namely, the medication to be administered to patients, its dosage and frequency, as well as the required therapy to be introduced into the process (Sperling, 2021). As a result, positive changes are expected to take place. Furthermore, the information obtained in the course of evidence-based practice will also shed light on issues related to the extent of patients’ awareness and health literacy. Therefore, the specified data will determine the further focus of patient education and the intensity with which it must be introduced into the selected environment.
Therefore, evidence-based care provides the essential foundation for decision-making as far as the management of patients’ needs is concerned. Additionally, evidence-based data will introduce opportunities for shaping financial and administrative nursing practices in the way that will benefit patients. Specifically, financial decisions can be affected by evidence-based care as nurses make decisions concerning the choice between similar medications in favor of a cheaper option based on the evidence collected from patients in the course of the treatment. Finally, the obtained information will also demonstrate the level of proficiency and efficacy of nurses delivering the necessary services to patients (Zeleníková et al., 2020). Thus, evidence-based information will help determine the course of nurses’ education process. Overall, evidence-based care offers a plethora of useful data that can be incorporated into the decision-making process.
Finally, the issue of evidence-based leadership in the nursing environment needs to be addressed as one of the essential constituents of a proper decision-making process. Making choices in a nursing context requires being fully aware of the essential issues and the manner in which they affect the efficacy of care. Therefore, the evidence-based approach to leading a team represents the best way of assigning roles and responsibilities to staff members, while providing nurses with the necessary guidance and encouraging them to continue developing as experts (Zeleníková et al., 2020). Thus, evidence-based leadership shapes the decision-making process by introducing the guidance, values, and ideas associated with current needs of the target population.
Indeed, since leadership, in its essence, is expected to not only guide team members toward the completion of key goals but also to the concept of personal and professional improvement, the use of the evidence-based approach will allow defining the course for staff members’ professional growth. Furthermore, empirical data offers a plethora of options for improving the quality and impact of nursing care. In turn, evidence-based information used in the process of leading team members allows avoiding some of the key biases occurring in the nursing context, primarily the one that causes maximizing the extent of subjectivity of data interpretation and the resulting lack of accuracy in choosing an appropriate decision (Jarosz et al., 2022). Therefore, incorporating evidence-based leadership into decision-making in a nursing context is vital.
Managing patients’ needs represents the core objective of any nursing expert, which is why strategies adopted in the nursing context must be geared primarily toward meeting patients’ needs and striving to increase the recovery rates, as well as mitigate the effects of public health issues. For this purpose, several changes could be made to the existing framework of nursing leadership. Namely, the inclusion of a focus on the unique goals of nursing, particularly the importance of patient education and the significance of administering the necessary interventions to the target population, will allow maintaining the quality and continuity of care Furthermore, the proposed approach to using the available using evidence a and introduce leadership elements into it will help guide the further introduction of administrative nursing tools and strategies into the target setting. As a result, the efficacy of nursing care is bound to rise stupendously.
References
Jarosz, K., Zborowska, A., & Młynarska, A. (2022). Rationing care, job satisfaction, fatigue and the level of professional burnout of nurses in urology departments.International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(14), 8625.
Scott, P. A., Harvey, C., Felzmann, H., Suhonen, R., Habermann, M., Halvorsen, K., & Papastavrou, E. (2019). Resource allocation and rationing in nursing care: A discussion paper.Nursing Ethics, 26(5), 1528-1539.
Sperling, D. (2021). Ethical dilemmas, perceived risk, and motivation among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nursing Ethics, 28(1), 9-22.
Zeleníková, R., Jarošová, D., Plevová, I., & Janíková, E. (2020). Nurses’ perceptions of professional practice environment and its relation to missed nursing care and nurse satisfaction.International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(11), 3805.
Zhu, X., Zheng, J., Liu, K., & You, L. (2019). Rationing of nursing care and its relationship with nurse staffing and patient outcomes: the mediation effect tested by structural equation modeling. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(10), 1672.