Benefits Of Electronic Medication Systems In Hospitals Essay Paper
Benefits Of Electronic Medication Systems In Hospitals Essay Paper
Aim: This assessment provides the student the opportunity to apply and evaluate leadership styles in a scenario involving a change process.
A recent state-wide quality improvement project has shown that a fully electronic medication system improves the safety of medication administration. In order to share this knowledge, the state organization has shared the results on a quality improvement website. The two hundred bed hospital where you work has recently had some medication critical incidents. These critical incidents occur in the context of a general increase of minor medication errors over the last three years. The hospital’s most senior Nurse/ Midwifery Leader has reviewed the information on the state’s quality improvement website. The Nurse/ Midwifery Leader calls the Nurse/ Midwifery Unit Managers for a meeting and advises of the general increase in medication errors and that there is an expectation that all wards will have adopted the fully electronic medication system within six months. The electronic medication system is freely available from the government and can be installed directly onto the ward computers.
Discuss how an effective Nurse/ Midwifery Unit Manager would lead this change to address this patient safety issue.
Provide reasons to adopt the fully electronic medication system use Lewin’s model to outline a plan of change that includes milestones and timeframes choose and apply a leadership style to the plan of change. Critically evaluate the choice and compare with at least one other leadership style describe two aspects of potential resistance and discuss how the resistance might be addressed. Benefits Of Electronic Medication Systems In Hospitals Essay Paper
Benefits Of Electronic Medication Systems
There has been a recent quality improvement project which has demonstrated that an electronic medication system boosts the efficacy of drug administration. The organization has already provided the outcome on the quality improvement website where hospitals are encouraged to adopt the new system. This came as a coincidence since there is a 200 bed hospital where I work and there have been cases of medication errors. The most senior nurses at the hospital have reviewed the system and have realized how efficient it is. As a result, they have called for nurses for a meeting and notifies them of the increase in errors and the need to implement the system within a time span of 6 months.in this assignment, the reasons as or the benefits for adopting the new system will be explored and how the Lewins three model would be incorporated into the change (Volpi & Giannelli, 2015).The leadership style to be used will also be discussed in comparison to another leadership style. Finally, the essay will address potential resistance and how the resistance can be handled.
The electronic medication system has a lot of benefits to both nurses, the patients and the hospital. The electronic medication system saves time (Dalal, Barto, & Smith, 2015). This is because the system has the ability to prescribe medicine to different patients at the same time. Since the system is error free, this means that there will be no time where a patient would be subjected to the wrong medication and this means that the patients will receive the best form of care (Saa, 2016) Since the system is interconnected to the whole hospital, different workers would easily communicate over the computers and this will also reduce the time wasted moving from one department to the other just to deliver certain information (Sethuraman, Kannikeswaran, Murray, Zidan, & Chamberlain, 2015) .An increase in the number served means high output and this means better returns for the hospital.
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The Lewins three step model has three steps that should be adhered when an organization is in attempts to make certain changes. The three steps of this model include unfreezing, changing and finally refreezing .During unfreezing which is the initial step, I would set the foundation straight for the change. This would last for two months and it will involve training all the relevant staff on how to install and use the new electronic medication system (Bakari, Hunjra, & Niazi, 2017).I will also ensure that the training sessions are separated into bits and I will make them as enjoyable as much so that the participants don’t get bored along the way and develop negative attitude towards the new system. I will ensure that the focus of the training is on the advantages of the system and how simple it is. This will really motivate the workers.
Lewin’s Three-Step Model
Changing is the next step in the Lewin three model. This will also last for two months after the unfreezing stage .This is the beginning of the practical aspect of the new system in real practice. The patients will now start having a feel of the new system (Cummings, Bridgman, & Brown, 2015). The manual system is now phased out gradually and it should be done slowly for the employees to acclimatize to the changes. The final step in this model is freezing and it involves making the changes permanent. This would also take two months and this means the whole process would last for six months. At this stage, there will be a complete transition to the electronic medication system.
There are different leadership styles that can be used in any organization to bring out a particular change(Saleem, 2015) .They include the Autocratic, democratic, Laissesz faire, transaction ,transformational and finally the Authentic leadership style. The leadership style selected plays an important role in defining if the desired change would be achieved or not. After carefully analyzing the leadership, I chose the transformational leadership style.
Transformational leadership is the best according to different studies. It is most preferred by the employees due to its numerous and positive outcomes that come with it. The objective of this leadership style is initiate change by motivating employees. This is because the leadership encourage communication (Yahaya & Ebrahim, 2016). In attempts to incorporate the electronic medication system, I will therefore motivate the employees to take in this change due to the numerous advantages that comes with it as explained earlier. All the employees are aware of the setbacks that the manual medication has plunged the hospital into (Anderson & Sun, 2015) .I will therefore communicate with them of how the new system would eradicate all the mess .I would also encourage the employees to give their opinions in regards of how the change should be implemented.
Autocratic leadership style is that type where the boss has the final say and the opinion of others does not count. The leadership style does not advocate for mutual decision making .It would be very difficult to bring out change at the hospital when using such leadership (Zampieron, Spanio, Bernardi, Milan, & Buja, 2012). The employees would feel neglected in the decision making process and as a result, the transition process would be one full of hurdles. That is why I would not utilize this type of leadership.
Transformational Leadership
There comes a time when change is necessary. However, the transition is often not that smooth. There is always the chance of resistance from a section of the employees’ .In this scenario, the aspects of resistance would arise due to the fact that system needs a full computerized version which some old members of the staff would take quite some time to adopt as they are used to the old manual paperwork of medication. To avoid this form of resistance, I would take time to communicate with them on the importance of the leadership style and train them extensively until they are comfortable with the new medication system.
The new system might also face resistance from a section of the customers since this would mean the customers would have to pay higher for the services to cater for the extra costs of implementing the change. To avoid this resistance, I would allow them to share their opinions and then I would educate them of how the cases of errors in medication would be a thing of the past. This would be enough to convince them to adopt the new electronic medication system.
Conclusion
In the past, medication has been a manual practice. The manual aspect of medication has in return led to the death of innocent patients especially children who are below 12 years and aged individuals especially those that are above 65 years. The 200 bed hospital in which I work has been hard hit by such errors and in the past 15 years, close to 15 patients have lost their lives. There has been cries from several stakeholders to come up with a long lasting solution and finally, the government has come up with the electronic medication system. This is a system that involves the use of different software and hardware’s. To implement the new system, it is better to use the transformational leadership style due to the numerous advantages associated with it .The Lewins three model was also used. Cases of resistance are also common and the nurse leaders ought to have the necessary skills to deal with them .This includes effective communication with all the affected parties .In most cases, change is associated with positive or better outcomes and the employees ought to take it positively.
References
Anderson, M. H., & Sun, P. Y. (2015). Reviewing Leadership Styles: Overlaps and the Need for a New ‘Full-Range’ Theory. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(1), 76-96. doi:10.1111/ijmr.12082
Bakari, H., Hunjra, A. I., & Niazi, G. S. (2017). How Does Authentic Leadership Influence Planned Organizational Change? The Role of Employees’ Perceptions: Integration of Theory of Planned Behavior and Lewin’s Three Step Model. Journal of Change Management, 17(2), 155-187. doi:10.1080/14697017.2017.1299370
Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2015). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human Relations, 69(1), 33-60. doi:10.1177/0018726715577707
Dalal, K. S., Barto, D., & Smith, T. R. (2015). Preventing medication errors in critical care. Nursing Critical Care, 10(5), 27-32. doi:10.1097/01.ccn.0000471002.71461.8d
SAA, H. (2016). Medication Errors by Novice Nurses in a Pediatric and Neonatal Care Setting of Pakistan: Analysis of Problems and Proposed Solutions. Pediatrics and Neonatal Nursing: Open Access ( ISSN 2470-0983 ), 2(1). doi:10.16966/2470-0983.110
Saleem, H. (2015). The Impact of Leadership Styles on Job Satisfaction and Mediating Role of Perceived Organizational Politics. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 172, 563-569. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.01.403
Sethuraman, U., Kannikeswaran, N., Murray, K. P., Zidan, M. A., & Chamberlain, J. M. (2015). Prescription Errors Before and After Introduction of Electronic Medication Alert System in a Pediatric Emergency Department. Academic Emergency Medicine, 22(6), 714-719. doi:10.1111/acem.12678
Volpi, E., & Giannelli, A. (2015). Human Factors Approach in the Design of an Electronic Medication Management System for Preventing Inpatient Medication Errors. Journal of Pharmacovigilance, s2. doi:10.4172/2329-6887.s2-006
Yahaya, R., & Ebrahim, F. (2016). Leadership styles and organizational commitment: literature review. Journal of Management Development, 35(2), 190-216. doi:10.1108/jmd-01-2015-0004
Zampieron, A., Spanio, D., Bernardi, P., Milan, R., & Buja, A. (2012). Nurse managers’ preferred and perceived leadership styles: a study at an Italian hospital. Benefits Of Electronic Medication Systems In Hospitals Essay Paper
