The vocation of a nursing leader, besides managerial and organizational tasks, encompasses the importance of being a role model and public supporter of one’s followers. Thus, when interacting with nurses, one of the primary leader’s responsibilities is to accumulate data on the staff’s concerns and expectations from the job. These data later help nursing leaders defend their staff’s interests and promote change during the interaction with the facility’s administration.
The aspect of advocacy for nurses plays a vital role in the overall paradigm of health care. Thus, according to Scott and Scott (2021), nurses’ responsibility to support and promoting public health care is rooted in the fundamentals of nursing. Hence, once nurses feel vulnerable and unsafe in the workplace, they are unable to prioritize the patients’ concerns. As a result, lack of advocacy for nurses results in poor patient outcomes, increased probability of medical errors, and lower accountability rates (Grand Canyon University, 2018). According to Nsiah et al. (2019), some of the most significant barriers to providing quality patient care include a lack of cooperation between the professional team and the healthcare institution. Such a lack creates a gap in terms of the team’s perception of a productive workplace and the institution’s vision of an efficient team.
Hence, in this scenario, nurse leaders serve as mediators between institution leaders and the nursing staff, as they know the specifics of being a nurse from within, promoting changes that might facilitate the workflow patterns. Without the leader’s support, nurses frequently feel left out of the conversation about the future of the healthcare institution and its innovation. For this reason, it may be concluded that the nurse leader’s ability to speak on behalf of nursing staff in terms of advocacy for better workflow and care is an asset for the whole team.
References
Grand Canyon University. (2018). Nursing leadership & management: Leading and serving [E-book]. Web.
Nsiah, C., Siakwa, M., & Ninnoni, J. P. (2020). Barriers to practicing patient advocacy in healthcare setting. Nursing Open, 7(2), 650-659.
Scott, S. M., & Scott, P. A. (2021). Nursing, advocacy and public policy. Nursing Ethics, 28(5), 723-733.