Week 4 Project Discussion: discuss the leadership improvement plan within this unit, including the topics below related to incorporating a healthy work environment
Week 4 Project Discussion: discuss the leadership improvement plan within this unit, including the topics below related to incorporating a healthy work environment
Week 4 Project
Instructions
Week 4 Project
In a Microsoft Word document of 4-5 pages formatted in APA style, consider the following scenario:
Tina is a new RN from the Philippines, working on a medical-surgical unit. She is enthusiastic and an excellent nurse. One day, Tina administered the wrong medication to a patient and documented it in the patient’s electronic health record. The error was discovered by George, a nurse on the night shift, who completed an incident report. The next morning, Tina was called into the nurse leader and managers office and reprimanded for the error. In the days that followed, George belittled Tina whenever he saw her. George told several nurses about Tina’s error and they began teasing her. Often, Tina would walk into the breakroom to find staff gossiping about her. Tina began feeling depressed and hated to go to work. After several months of being bullied, Tina resigned and went to work at another hospital.
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In your paper, discuss the leadership improvement plan within this unit, including the topics below related to incorporating a healthy work environment:
Describe the need for team member respect, value, and security.
Discuss a safe and caring culture by demonstrating effective use of strategies to reduce harm to self and others, as well as zero tolerance for bullying or lateral/horizontal violence.
Explain the leadership role to improve team member support within a diverse workforce.
Discuss the importance for all team members to actively engage and support a healthy work environment.
Identify three (3) leadership interventions that should have occurred within the case scenario above.
Support your responses with examples and information from library resources, textbook and lectures.
On a separate reference page, cite all sources using APA format. Please note that the title and reference pages should not be included in the total page count of your paper.
Use the South University Online Library link in your course menu to access these APA resources:
APA Citation Helper, a convenient reference for properly citing resources. This handout will provide you the details of formatting your essay using APA style.
APA Basic Essay Template to create your essay.
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Week 4 Project
The promotion of safety in healthcare is imperative for the realization of optimum outcomes in care. Healthcare providers require safe work environments there their needs are prioritized. The work environment conditions should not predispose them to any form of social, emotional, or physical harm. Healthcare institutions often strive to ensure safe work environments for their staffs through the creation of culture of safety. Organizational issues such as bullying however affect the realization of the desired safety outcomes in healthcare organizations. Bullying predisposes providers to low job satisfaction and morale, which increases their risk of leaving the organization. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the leadership improvement plan that will be used to prevent future encounters that Tina experienced in her workplace. Tina committed a medication error, and documented it in the electronic health records of the patient. George discovered the error and reported it to the nurse on night shift. The events afterwards led to isolation and bullying of Tina, which made her quit and work in another hospital.
Need for Team Member Respect, Value and Security
Tina experienced workplace bullying after she committed and reported a medication error in the patient’s electronic health records. The bullying was severe that it made her to quit the hospital and work in another hospital. Tina’s experiences show the lack of respect, organizational values and security for the healthcare providers. The hospital where Tina worked should adopt values that recognize the protection of individual rights. Accordingly, the organization and its stakeholders should ensure that the work environmental conditions support diversity and prioritization of the employee needs. The organization should also support the values of transparency and non-discrimination in the reporting of safety and adverse events. Discrimination and punitive actions towards reported safety events threaten the care quality, as the employees will not embrace transparent reporting mechanisms.
Respect is also important to prevent similar events related to that of Tina in the future in the organization. The organization needs to promote workplace civility where employees respect the needs, values, and diversity of others. The organization also needs to implement policies where privacy and confidentiality of data is promoted to minimize workplace bullying. It also needs to adopt policies that prohibit bullying and violence in the workplace. The employees should be assured of their social, emotional, and physical safety in the organization. The organization should be non-tolerant on any acts of behaviors that threaten the safety needs of the healthcare providers and patients. Through it, experiences such as that of Tina will be avoided in the organization.
Safe and Care Culture
A safe and caring culture is needed to reduce the harm of self and others and zero tolerance for bullying or lateral violence in the organization. A safe and caring culture minimizes the harm to patients and healthcare providers. Interventions such as teamwork, active involvement of patients in the care process, prioritizing safety, accountability, and openness are critical for the creation of a caring and safety culture. The organization needs to demonstrate its dedication to prioritizing safety by implementing zero tolerance policies against bullying and violence. The safety culture should form part of the behaviors, decisions, norms and values of the organizational stakeholders to limit possible safety events in the organization. The organization also needs to develop shared core values as well as goals, adopt non-punitive responses and enhancing safety through safety training and education (Fink-Samnick, 2018). The leadership and management should also demonstrate their commitment towards empowering the employees to support the strengthening of culture of patient safety in the organization. Through it, the organization will achieve a balance in not blaming the providers of care for errors and not tolerating any egregious behaviors in the organization (Rutherford et al., 2019). Therefore, the consideration of the above strategies will promote the creation of organizational culture that does not tolerate bullying, violence, and behaviors that contribute to safety events in patient care.
Leadership Role
Leadership in the organization where Tina worked has critical roles to play in improving member support within a diverse workforce. One of the roles is ensuring that the staffs acknowledge the existence of difference among them and respecting them. Acknowledging differences among the staffs contributes to tolerance among the healthcare providers. It also increases the awareness of the healthcare providers about the need to embrace non-discriminatory behaviors and explore culturally appropriate interventions in care and their interactions (West et al., 2018).
The leadership also has the role of ensuring the promotion of cultural competence among their staffs. Accordingly, the leadership provides opportunities such as cultural training to ensure that the staffs have the needed culturally competent knowledge and skills to promote ethical and moral behaviors among them. Leadership also strengthens the creation of culture that promotes safety of staffs from diverse backgrounds (Bambi et al., 2017). The policies strengthen the need for inclusivity in the workforce and non-tolerance of any vices of discrimination based on inherent differences such as ethnicity, age, and gender in the workplace.
Leaders of the organization also have the responsibility of upholding and enforcing strong values to prevent similar events related to that of Tina in the future. Leaders have the role of influencing and encouraging the other leaders and managers to initiate dialogue and support values such as discipline, respect and humility. They not only role model best values but also uphold and enforce them through the culture of their organization, communication and sustainable change strategies (Cutler et al., 2019). The outcomes of such dedication from the leadership will include enhanced productivity, innovation, and cross-functional learning in the organization.
Importance of Team Member Engagement
It is important for all the team members to actively engage and support a healthy work environment for a number of reasons. Firstly, active involvement of the team members in creating and supporting a healthy work environment promotes their empowerment. The team members are empowered to take ownership of the strategies used to foster safe work environment and explore additional innovative strategies to achieve optimum outcomes. Active engagement of the team members also ensures sustainability of the interventions adopted to create a healthy work environment. Accordingly, the team members incorporate the interventions into their daily routines, forming part of their culture (Morley & Cashell, 2017). As a result, sustainable outcomes will be achieved in the process.
Active engagement and supporting a healthy work environment for employees also contributes to their motivation. The employees are motivated to go an extra mile in ensuring safety; efficiency and quality are achieved in patient care. For example, active engagement of the employees and supporting a healthy work environment encourages them to explore evidence-based interventions that can be used to optimize care outcomes. The retention rates among the staffs also increases significantly when are actively engaged and supported in creating a healthy work environment (Cutler et al., 2019). Accordingly, their perceive sense of job security and organizational recognition of their diverse needs increases, leading to reduced intent to leave the organization among them.
Leadership Interventions
One of the leadership interventions that should have occurred in Tina’s case study is not adopting a punitive approach to the reported error. Non-punitive approaches to errors in healthcare promote culture of openness and transparency. The leadership should have investigated the error, factors that led to it, and use the experience to develop strategies to prevent its future occurrence (Hargett et al., 2017). Through it, the organization could have learned from its errors.
The second leadership intervention that should have occurred in Tina’s case study is the leadership adopting a stand that does not tolerate discrimination and bullying of staffs that commit errors. The leadership should have worked with the employees and management in exploring the ways in which safety outcomes can be achieved based on Tina’s experience (Fink-Samnick, 2018). It should have also implemented strict measures to bar any staff from engaging in behaviors that amounted to Tina’s discrimination and bullying in the organization.
The last leadership intervention that should have occurred is strengthening teamwork in patient care. The organizational leadership should have used the error as an opportunity to increase the need for teamwork and inter-professional collaboration in patient care. Teamwork eliminates the risk of safety events in case, as the healthcare providers work together in developing best plans for achieving the optimum care outcomes of their patients (Ward et al., 2018). Therefore, teamwork would have increased the competence of the staffs, hence, elimination of safety and quality events in the future.
Conclusion
In summary, Tina’s experience demonstrates lack of respect, security, values, and effective leadership in the organization. It also demonstrates increased predisposition of staffs to harm due to bullying and violence. Therefore, it is important that effective leadership styles be embraced in the organization to prevent and minimize the safety events. Culture of care and safety should also be created to promote the health and wellbeing of both patients and healthcare providers.
References
Bambi, S., Guazzini, A., De Felippis, C., Lucchini, A., & Rasero, L. (2017). Preventing workplace incivility, lateral violence and bullying between nurses. A narrative literature review. Acta Bio Medica : Atenei Parmensis, 88(Suppl 5), 39–47. https://doi.org/10.23750/abm.v88i5-S.6838
Cutler, S., Morecroft, C., Carey, P., & Kennedy, T. (2019). Are interprofessional healthcare teams meeting patient expectations? An exploration of the perceptions of patients and informal caregivers. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 33(1), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2018.1514373
Fink-Samnick, E. (2018). The New Age of Bullying and Violence in Health Care: Part 4: Managing Organizational Cultures and Beyond. Professional Case Management, 23(6), 294–306. https://doi.org/10.1097/NCM.0000000000000324
Hargett, C. W., Doty, J. P., Hauck, J. N., Webb, A. M., Cook, S. H., Tsipis, N. E., Neumann, J. A., Andolsek, K. M., & Taylor, D. C. (2017). Developing a model for effective leadership in healthcare: A concept mapping approach. Journal of Healthcare Leadership, 9, 69–78. https://doi.org/10.2147/JHL.S141664
Morley, L., & Cashell, A. (2017). Collaboration in Health Care. Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, 48(2), 207–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmir.2017.02.071
Rutherford, D. E., Gillespie, G. L., & Smith, C. R. (2019). Interventions against bullying of prelicensure students and nursing professionals: An integrative review. Nursing Forum, 54(1), 84–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/nuf.12301
Ward, M. E., De Brún, A., Beirne, D., Conway, C., Cunningham, U., English, A., Fitzsimons, J., Furlong, E., Kane, Y., Kelly, A., McDonnell, S., McGinley, S., Monaghan, B., Myler, A., Nolan, E., O’Donovan, R., O’Shea, M., Shuhaiber, A., & McAuliffe, E. (2018). Using Co-Design to Develop a Collective Leadership Intervention for Healthcare Teams to Improve Safety Culture. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(6), 1182. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15061182
West, M. A., Hwang, S., Maier, R. V., Ahuja, N., Angelos, P., Bass, B. L., Brasel, K. J., Chen, H., Davis, K. A., Eberlein, T. J., Fong, Y., Greenberg, C. C., Lillemoe, K. D., McCarthy, M. C., Michelassi, F., Numann, P. J., Parangi, S., Reyes, J. D., Sanfey, H. A., … Wren, S. M. (2018). Ensuring Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Academic Surgery: An American Surgical Association White Paper. Annals of Surgery, 268(3), 403–407. https://doi.org/10.1097/SLA.0000000000002937