Clinical Leadership

Clinical leadership is a quality possessed by healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses which encourages a high level of clinical care and providing services with utmost quality to the patients. The features which should be in a clinician who wants to lead are Arrangement of the system, Quality of influencing an audience, ability to encourage vision and values and using his experience in the healthcare field to meet with patient's need. These people can also use their talent to change policies and system which would make service much better (Budak, 2017).

There are 5 different types of leadership style in nursing. They are Transformational, Democratic, Laissez-Faire, Autocratic and servant. Transformational leadership is done by making relationships and encouraging staff members. Transformational leaders have the power to inspire staff respect and confidence. Democratic style of leadership is a style where team members are involved in decision making. Because of this, members of the staff feel more engaged in the process of management (Xu, 2017). Laissez-Faire style of leadership is in which the leader doesn’t make any decision and staff members act without supervision. Autocratic leadership is important in a time of emergencies as all the powers lie with the leader itself and he's the only one who makes decisions without taking the opinion of the staff (Sfantou et al., 2017). Servant style of leadership follows the idea that a leader should serve. It is mainly focused on the actions of the leader. Here, the leader tries to make an organization sustainable by bringing out the best from the employees and serving the community (Aij & Rapsaniotis, 2017).

When I was in my clinical placement, I noticed a case where a student nurse has committed a mistake while attending a patient. He assumed that some other nurse has cleaned the wound which the patient has and he applied bandages on it directly. The wound being infected caused a lot of pain to the patient. When the patient was confronted by NUM, then it was discovered that the wound was not cleaned. NUM instantly called the entire student nurses and ask them what should be done first. Students replied and the procedure was completed by NUM himself quickly. He then suggested everyone be very careful while attending a patient as there can be severe complications also. Like this, he took everyone on this case and took every decision mutually with the student.

The leadership style shown in the case by NUM is democratic. This leadership style has shown improvement in health services quality and has increased safety. It was also found out that nurses who follow this type of leadership are further prone to perform individual duties and functions of the team. By the help of this, every member of the staff is encouraged to state their opinions (Xu, 2017).

References for Clinical Leadership

Aij, K. H., & Rapsaniotis, S. (2017). Leadership requirements for Lean versus servant leadership in health care: a systematic review of the literature. Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 9, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.2147/JHL.S120166

Budak, F. (2017). The importance of clinical leadership in healthcare management. Journal of Current Researches 7(2).

Sfantou, D. F., Laliotis, A., Patelarou, A. E., Sifaki-Pistolla, D., Matalliotakis, M., & Patelarou, E. (2017). Importance of leadership style towards quality of care measures in healthcare settings: A systematic review. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland), 5(4), 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare5040073

Xu, J. H. (2017). Leadership theory in clinical practice. Chinese Nursing Research,4(4),155-157.

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