Advocacy Strategies
Nursing leaders should be effective and consistent advocates for fostering a positive healthcare environment while improving patient outcomes. Advocacy strategies are instrumental in safeguarding patients while promoting healthier communities. Nurse leaders may advocate protecting patients’ legal rights, understand their healthcare issues such as diagnosis and prognosis, or even offer assistance and support to promote patients’ health and safety (Heck et al., 2022). Healthcare organizations should encourage quality leadership that initiates and supports advocacy as it influences positive change and better outcomes.
Nurse leaders adopt different advocacy strategies to create a positive healthcare change. First, effective communication is an instrumental advocacy strategy to influence positive changes in nursing (Groenwald & Eldridge, 2020). Thus, the nursing leader and the entire healthcare team promote collaboration that ensures the patients receive consistent quality care to achieve the desired change goal. The leader should inform the healthcare team about the goals directed toward a positive change. Secondly, problem-solving is crucial to advocate for positive change in a healthcare environment (Advocacy Strategies).
Problem-solving skills allow the healthcare team to devise appropriate strategies through critical thinking and evidence-based practice. For instance, nursing leaders should lead the healthcare team to identify patients’ needs and challenges faced during care and devise strategies to improve care. Continued education for nursing leaders and their teams is essential to learn about new healthcare paradigms and developments. For this reason, the leaders gain more ideas about advocacy initiatives in the workplace.
I have always had a passion for advocacy. Consequently, I promote a safe and conducive working environment in the clinical unit. I communicate openly, respect, and treat all healthcare staff equally. Furthermore, I am always visible and available to assist my colleagues in solving problems, and I remain optimistic about fostering positive changes. I promote interpersonal and organizational relationships through effective communication crucial to building trust and fostering teamwork.
Teamwork has played a vital role in improving patient outcomes since the healthcare team collaborate to meet the patients’ need and solve potential problems in the clinical unit (Chen & Gong, 2022). Effective communication has allowed the healthcare team to devise plans based on the patient’s needs. I portray effective leadership strategies and believe that improving on my consistent will aid me in promoting more positive changes and improving health outcomes.
References
Chen, Y., & Gong, Y. (2022). Teamwork and Patient Safety in Intensive Care Units: Challenges and Opportunities. Studies in health technology and informatics, 290, 469.
Groenwald, S. L., & Eldridge, C. (2020, January). Politics, power, and predictability of nursing care. In Nursing Forum (Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 16-32).
Heck, L. O., Carrara, B. S., Mendes, I. A. C., & Arena Ventura, C. A. (2022). Nursing and advocacy in health: An integrative review. Nursing Ethics, 29(4), 1014-1034.