Resolving Conflict in a Healthcare Setting

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of a real-life conflict in a healthcare setting, including the cause of the conflict, the parties that were involved, how the conflict was resolved, and whether the outcome was fair to all the individuals who were involved. In addition, an explanation concerning how the conflict could have been avoided from the outset is followed by a description of the associated DNP essentials and which leadership competencies were applied and how they served to accomplish the outcome. Finally, the paper provides a summary of the findings in the conclusion.

Real-life example of conflict

Several years ago, a program specialist in the office of quality assurance (OOQA) in a tertiary healthcare facility was tasked with trending all patient incidents by her supervisor to identify trends and opportunities for improvement in the delivery of patient care. These reports were to be disseminated to all medical center services for review during the month quality assurance meetings to determine if their service was affected or otherwise played a role pursuant to Joint Commission requirements....

The program specialist collected patient incident data for the previous year to establish benchmarks and trended all of the patient incident reports by incident type, time of day, location and so forth.

After distributing the first year of patient incident data to all services, the program specialist realized that the nursing ward- and shift-specific data were skewed because the data was not weighted by the number of patient-days of care that were involved. In other words, a ward that experienced 10 medication errors in a month caring for 1,000 patients had a much...

…organizational and policy levels (Essential II) as well as the ability to integrate knowledge from diverse sources (Essential III).

Describe which of the Leadership role competencies were accomplished in this week's discussion. How?

By resolving the conflict to improve patient care, the OOQA director demonstrated the effective leadership skills that are a fundamental DNR competency.

Conclusion

Conflict is inevitable in all organizations, but the stakes for achieving appropriate outcomes are especially high in healthcare settings. In this regard, the above-described conflict was resolved effectively by the responsible DNR by gathering all of the facts, evaluating the program specialists and supervisors respective positions and supporting rationale and arriving at a decision that was in the best interests of patients. This conflict underscores the harsh reality that not all conflicts are caused by legitimate reasons and it is essential to determine the facts before…