The Role of the Nurse Leader

Issues And Trends That Affect Nursing and Nurse Leadership

The nursing shortage is a significant issue affecting nursing and nurse leadership (Haddad, Annamaraju, & Toney-Butler, 2020). There is an overall shortage of registered nurses across the United States. Nursing schools have to turn away interested students due to a shortage of student positions, which affects the number of nurses completing the nursing curriculum. The nursing shortage results in the available nurses having to work for longer hours (Haddad et al., 2020). With extended working hours, the likelihood of making a mistake increases, which compromises patient safety. Therefore, there is an increase in medication errors and neglected patients.

As a nurse leader, the best way to mitigate the nursing shortage is to ensure the organization has better systems (Haddad et al., 2020). Nurses spend most of their time searching for doctors and medications, completing redundant paperwork, and hunting down equipment. All this can be mitigated by having efficient systems for delivering nursing care. Ensuring nurses spend most of their hours performing their core duties will reduce burnout and redundancy.

The Role of The Nurse Leader

Nurse leaders are vital in the implementation of innovations and facilitating solution refinement to other nurses. They will act as change champions who will be demonstrating the benefits of the innovation to the nurses (Manges, Scott?Cawiezell, & Ward, 2017). The nurse leader will encourage team collaboration by encouraging communication between the nurses and the sharing of information. With communication, all nurses on a floor can attend to a patient since they are aware of their patient needs. Coordinating team training is another role played by the nurse leader (Manges et al., 2017). Through training, nurses can learn new skills and learn how to use new systems or equipment.

Before encouraging others to use a new system, they need to understand its impact on patient outcomes. Therefore, nurse leaders will have to use their research and investigation skills to discover information regarding the new system and its benefits within their organization. Using research, the nurse leader can determine the best system or approach to use to improve patient outcomes. Competencies required to manage change based on evidence are communication, leadership, research, reporting, and strategic analysis (Manges et al., 2017).