Leadership Styles in Nursing

Recent developments in the field of management-organization and organizational behavior and new concepts have also led to the emergence of new leadership styles in leadership. Leadership in health services is important for following innovations and adapting to current situations. Nurses working together with other health personnel in hospitals providing health services constitute an important group in leadership. Nursing, which is a key force for patient safety and safe care, is a human-centered profession, and therefore leadership is a key skill for nurses at all levels. The leadership styles of nurse managers are believed to be an important determinant of job satisfaction and persistence of nurses. The need for nurses with leadership skills and the need for nurses to develop their leadership skills are increasing day by day. There are several leadership styles defined in nursing literature. These leadership styles are examined under the titles of relational leadership style, transformational leadership, resonant leadership, emotional intelligence leadership, and participatory leadership. The task-focused leadership style is explored under the headings of transactional and autocratic leadership, laissez-faire leadership, and instrumental leadership.

Simulation: A Training Resource for Quality Care and Improving Patient Safety

Patient safety is an ever-present topic in the discussion of educators. It has been 20 years since the publication of To Err Is Human, and there are lessons learned, although there is still much to be done. Healthcare systems are becoming increasingly complex, putting the safety of patients at risk. In this context, there is a greater exposure of healthcare professionals to medical-legal liability issues and to becoming victims of situations that are often preventable. Nurses and medical doctors are especially exposed to these situations, since they are visible during procedures, or do so during the points of greater risk during the patient care process. This chapter will review the contribution provided by the curricular integration of simulation-based education as a tool to train technical and nontechnical issues and how this work can be done for the safety of patients through a standardized training plan, under controlled and evaluated processes. We will discuss how resources and elements allow to perform healthcare interventions in a more safely manner. Finally, we will review the existing literature, some experiences, and the available evidence on this topic.

Nurse-Patient Conflict: Verification of Structural Model

This chapter focuses on the overlooked area of everyday nursing care in which engaging in the depressive feelings between nurses and patients is not recognized as part of nursing care. To comprehend situations that had been overlooked, a conceptual model was constructed by focusing on nurse-patient conflicts and understanding the perception of both nurses and patients based on phenomena. In the established model, it is considered that the so-called “passion” emanating from one’s personality, which is beyond techniques of communication and empathic understanding, is involved; this passion is expressed as an “emotional exchange.” In an “emotional exchange,” one sends “emotional” messages to whom he/she feels safe to express “emotions” and shares similar emotional world by receiving those “emotional” messages as they are. Such an expression has not been reported previously.

Keeping Patients Safe: The Critical Role of Medical Error Recovery

Two decades after the Institute of Medicine Report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System illuminated the high number of preventable deaths and adverse events associated with health care, medical errors remain a top global concern. To date, resources have been focused on preventing medical errors; however, the importance of error recovery must not be overlooked. Medical errors cannot be fully eliminated from our health care system, yet many errors can be recovered thus preventing patient harm. This chapter will (1) define and describe the error recovery process, (2) discuss the role of health care providers in error recovery, (3) explore strategies that enhance and prohibit error recovery, and (4) analyze characteristics that influence error recovery. Given the importance of patient safety within the health care industry, health care professionals and organizations must focus on both error prevention and error recovery as a key strategy in keeping patients safe.

Nursing Environments: Nurses Perspectives

Nurses have been found to experience higher burnout levels compared with other health professionals owing to the nature of their work. High burnout levels among nurses have been attributed to their stressful working environments. Prolonged exposure to work-related stress leading to burnout has negative consequences for job satisfaction and general health of nurses. This has wider implications on the health system, such as high turnover rates and compromised patient care. There is a significant gap in research focusing on the relationship between work-related stress, burnout, job satisfaction and general health of nurses in developing countries such as South Africa. A study exploring the relationships between work-related stress, burnout, job satisfaction and general health among South African nurses over time was conducted in order to inform how best to improve nursing environments while enabling quality nursing practice and patient care. A total of 895 nurses participated in the study at baseline and 277 of these individuals were followed up with a year later. Findings showed that although stress related to security risks in the workplace predicts job satisfaction as well as general health, stress related to patient care and nursing shortages better predict job satisfaction and general health over time. Burnout better predicts job satisfaction than general health over time.

Patient Safety in a First-Level Hospital in Colombia, According to London Protocol

The objective of this study is to identify the adherence of the health personnel of the state social enterprise Norte 2 institution, Caloto, Department of Cauca, Colombia, in the application of the London protocol, referring to patient safety policy, where a quantitative investigation was conducted; observational, descriptive through a census of 92 officials of the institution through a survey designed to measure adherence to protocol, all information was tabulated in the Epi-info 7.2 program and presented by descriptive statistics; the results of this study showed that the population is composed of 60% of female nursing assistants who are more than 1-year old and that the protocol is partially met, where it was found that only 52% of adverse events are reported, concluding that there is no defined patient safety culture, which means that adverse events are not documented.