Interprofessional Organization and System Leadership Essay Paper

Discussion: Organizational Policies and Practices to Support Healthcare Issues
Quite often, nurse leaders are faced with ethical dilemmas, such as those associated with choices between competing needs and limited resources. Resources are finite, and competition for those resources occurs daily in all organizations.

For example, the use of 12-hour shifts has been a strategy to retain nurses. However, evidence suggests that as nurses work more hours in a shift, they commit more errors. How do effective leaders find a balance between the needs of the organization and the needs of ensuring quality, effective, and safe patient care?

In this Discussion, you will reflect on a national healthcare issue and examine how competing needs may impact the development of polices to address that issue.

Post an explanation of how competing needs, such as the needs of the workforce, resources, and patients, may impact the development of policy. Then, describe any specific competing needs that may impact the national healthcare issue/stressor you selected. What are the impacts, and how might policy address these competing needs? Be specific and provide examples.

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Interprofessional Organization and System Leadership

Managing the limited resources is perhaps the greatest challenging that any leader, including nurse leaders, can face. In a rapidly changing health care environment, nurse leaders are forced to be strategic and proactive in their collaborative actions to ensure that changing health care priorities are managed. Interprofessional Organization and System Leadership Essay Paper  In addition, they must be accountable, responsible and responsive, as well as engage other stakeholders as they respond to turbulence. In the present context, turbulence refers to nursing care delivery changes at any level, whether at the high level (i.e., national, state or city levels) or at the grassroots level (i.e., local, facility or unit). The different levels of turbulence intersect to have a significant impact on decision making for nurse leaders (Geyman, 2018).

Based on the span of control and need, it is not uncommon for nurse leaders to find themselves having to present prompt responses by introducing new programs, changing budget priorities, redirecting program priorities, decommissioning outdated/old equipment, purchasing new equipment, training nursing staff on new skills, or making staffing adjustments. Whatever decision the nurse leader faces, it is important to prioritize how resources are allocated in order to maximize benefits and minimise harms in key areas. It is this awareness that informs policy development through guiding decisions along the same lines. For that matter, policy development similarly prioritizes resource allocations to maximize benefits and minimize harms in target performance areas (Porter-O’Grady & Malloch, 2016).

The selected national health care issue was electronics health records (EHR), a notable medical technology advancement the leverages information and communication technologies to facilitate access to medical records with the intention of supporting health care decision structures. EHR makes use of specialised technologies with different capabilities. These technologies include copyright protected algorithms and codes. The development of EHR has involved much investment, and like any other business endeavour, the different EHR systems with their different capabilities are priced differently (Mastrian & McGonigle, 2017). When making decisions about whether or not to acquire a EHR system, nurse leaders must grapple with the reality that a more capable system will require greater capital investment (to purchase, install, support and maintain the system), and yet these same funds are required for other health care improvement projects (Geyman, 2018). For instance, the nurse leader can grapple with the option of either purchasing an expensive and capable EHR system to improve patient outcomes, or purchasing a cheaper and less capable EHR system that is then matched with investment in hiring additional nurses. Making the decision between the two options requires a balance that is typically tipped by cost-benefit analysis outcomes.

Policy help nurses to address such dilemmas. That is because policy allows them to shift from being proactive towards being reactive. In the absence of policy, each nurse leader is likely to apply different decision-making structures that would cause their decisions to differ. In fact, it will not be surprising for the same nurse leader to present different decisions and justifications if faced with the same decision scenario at different times. Policy helps in standardising decision-making by presenting structures that determine what decisions are made (Porter-O’Grady & Malloch, 2016). For instance, if policy demands that a facility should install a EHR system with specific functionalities, then decisions would be restricted by these guidelines such that the nurse leader would always make the same decision if faced with the same scenario at different times.

References

Geyman, J. (2018). Crisis in U.S. health care: corporate power vs. the common good. New York, NY: Copernicus Healthcare

Mastrian, K. & McGonigle, D. (2017). Informatics for health professionals. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Porter-O’Grady, T. & Malloch, K. (2016). Leadership in nursing practice: changing the landscape of healthcare (2^nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.  Interprofessional Organization and System Leadership Essay Paper