Effective Approaches in Leadership and Management (Essay Sample)

EFFECTIVE APPROACHES IN LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT: CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENT AND PATIENT SATISFACTION
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The role of the nursing leader or manager in the healthcare set-up remains paramount when it comes to continuous quality improvement and realization of patient satisfaction. In this regard, quality of care entails the degree to which health care services for patients increase the probability of desired health outcomes that are consistent with current professional know-how and expectations. For the nursing leader or manager, the aims of safety and effectiveness are targeted through the approach-of-care measures, evaluation of whether physicians perform processes that have been shown to achieve the desired goals and avoid processes that have a degree of predisposed harm or ineffectiveness. The critical role of the nursing manager is to assess the effects of healthcare on anticipated outcomes and evaluate the degree to which physicians and clinicians adhere to processes that concur with professional consensus and scientific evidence. Since errors in healthcare systems result from system or process failures, it is the role of the nursing leader to facilitate the adoption of various process-improvement techniques that enable the identification of inefficiencies, preventable errors, and ineffective care. The role of the manager then entails the identification of the best approaches that can guide the nursing process to avoid these errors and develop a continuous performance improvement model.
Contemporary Approach to quality improvement
The complexity of healthcare delivery systems, the unpredictable nature of health care, and the occupational interdependence and differentiation among physicians and systems make quality evaluation difficult for the nursing leaders and managers. One of the greatest challenges involves the attribution variability associated with the discretionary nature of decision-making process and high-level cognitive reasoning. All these factors require an in-depth level of experiential knowledge and problem-solving skills for both nursing leaders and healthcare managers. Another greatest challenge for the current continuous improvement approaches entails the ability of the managers and leaders to make precise determinations as to whether certain errors are likely to result in harm. Furthermore, nursing leaders sometimes find it hard to make a determination as to whether some adverse events during the nursing process represent just some rare aberrations, or are likely to occur over and over again. The ability to make these determinations can hinder or streamline continuous improvement efforts in healthcare delivery and the assurance of patient satisfaction (Hernandez, 2009).
When it comes to improving the quality of health care delivered in hospitals, it is plausible that an improvement in physician-patient relationship remains very important. Among the expected difficulties in this concept is the multitude of confidentiality and privacy concerns (World Health Organization, 2006). These issues are a mainly a matter of individuals’ rights, and how such rights can be balanced in line with society’s need for more aggregate information concerning patient outcomes and medical practice. Another critical issue revolves around the improvement of the definition of informed consent, as well as techniques of obtaining it. Issues of malpractice and information disclosure, especially when it comes to public release of provider or institution-specific information, also pose high visibility. The due process and rights of appeal in instances where poor quality of care is alleged may also prove to be important areas for further considerations (Morrison, 2009).
Continuous quality assurance
Analysis of the quality of care is quite difficult than measuring patient outcomes or assessing the technical components of care. When analyzed in terms of essential communication between physician and patient, the art of care can be analyzed by techniques that tap the content of data or the affect relayed during medical investigations. With current revolutions in the sector of information communication technology, any future improvements in the quality of care, as well as patient well-being must be made the objective of technology assessment. In this regard, the fundamental aim of such form of technology assessment must be to determine patient benefit. It is important to note that both technology assessment and quality assurance call for a broad definition of health in that both make evaluative judgments and call for causal linkage between health outcome and health care process. Furthermore, both concepts require that the distinction between effectiveness and efficacy must be clearly comprehended (Morrison, 2009). In order to ensure that these assessments can be used as constructive guides for health care practices, they must be perfumed with explicit assumptions regarding the levels of quality expected to be observed in case the practice becomes widely diffused. This, of course, is an issue of effectiveness.
Selected Approach
In order to form precise evaluations of the quality of care in institutions of health care, it is paramount to focus on explicit criteria such as the problem-specific concepts of care that the medical practitioners concur are important, measurable and relevant. The criteria for evaluating these elements of care must incorporate patient values and preferences. Furthermore, the desired elements of quality care delivery must prove to be valid and reliable. This means that they produce the same outcomes when the dame object is evaluated. The extent to which the existing criteria are clinically or statistically valid is crucial to quality of care development and research. Indeed, there is no comprehensive inventory that comprises of all diagnosis-specific criteria objectives that may be utilized in today’s health care environment. Thus, there is need for the development of a central repository of information, with valid and reliable standards and criteria, which can...