Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample

Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample

            Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) graduates are trained experts in clinical practice and often ascend to leadership positions in various health care organizations. DNP graduates are considered system leaders, can identify health care gaps, propose interventions, and lead project change implementation and evaluation.  This paper’s purpose is to demonstrate the author’s leadership capacity to manage a practice change project. The paper consists of three sections; (1) Organizational needs assessment, (2) Leading the practice change project, and (3) Leading practice change teams with innovation and effective management.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

 Organizational Needs Assessment

Individuals with type 2 diabetes require proper disease management, including controlling their blood sugar levels, adopting healthy eating, exercises, medication, or insulin. Many people can effectively manage type 2 diabetes with adequate resources and support. However, if the condition is not managed correctly, it can affect other body organs, leading to complications like bacterial and fungal infections and skin problems. Worst case scenario, lack of proper management increase patient mortality rates. Conducting a needs assessment is critical to help an organization identify gaps that prevent it from achieving the desired goals, in this case, proper type 2 diabetes self-management. The gaps can exist in the organization’s knowledge, practices, or skills regarding the problem. The assessment helps the organization determine effective strategies and interventions to accomplish its objectives. This section evaluates the practice problem, existing gap, relevant intervention, and research question to answer the practice gap.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Problem

The problem affects the endocrinology unit that specializes in treating patients with diabetes. The endocrinologists working in the unit are the key stakeholders responsible for informing and advising major decisions regarding diabetes. The hospital leaders and administrators are also responsible for making significant decisions to address the gap identified and support intervention implementation through resource mobilization. The problem identified is self-management among the rising number of type 2 diabetes patients. Limited access to diabetes self-management education at the hospital affects the patients’ ability to manage their condition effectively. The endocrinologists are responsible for treating diabetes and are directly affected by the identified problem. They understand what is best for their patients, and the needs assessment informs the need for diabetes self-management education (DSME/S). The leadership and administration are responsible for supporting the recommended interventions, and their decisions directly impact the unit’s efficiency in addressing the gap.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Practice Gap

The identified gap is the lack of proper practice guidelines that support type 2 diabetes self-management at the practice site. Specifically, the needs assessment identified a lack of diabetes self-management education to guide the patient in managing their condition. Many barriers prevent the implementation of a proper patient education platform or means, including limited funding and staff members, workload and time pressures, patients’ access issues, and uncoordinated relationships and communication with other specialist teams. The lack of education means patients have inadequate knowledge, behavioral guidelines, and support to manage their condition. DSME/S is crucial as it helps and motivates patients to adjust to lifestyles after diagnoses and during the treatment process. The identified intervention is face-to-face and telephone-based family-oriented education in type 2 diabetes management (Hemmati et al., 2017). MHealth mobile applications are also an intervention that can help patients live healthily by sending patients adherence and treatment guidelines through messages (Boels et al., 2019). However, the hospital lacks guidelines for mobile applications used in type 2 diabetes management. The rising number of type 2 diabetes patients requires more effort from the care team to educate the patients to adhere to treatment and management guidelines.   (Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Practice Question

For patients with type 2 diabetes, does the implementation of face-to-face and telephone-based family-oriented education and mHealth mobile applications compared to written patient education materials improve self-management of type 2 diabetes among patients after diagnosis and during the treatment period?(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Spell the PICOT question out first, then put in a paragraph:

P: patients with type 2 diabetes

I: implementation of face-to-face and telephone-based family-oriented education and mhealth applications

C: written patient education materials self-management of type 2 diabetes

O: I do not see an outcome

T: define time 30 days

Leading the Practice Change Project

The central challenge affecting healthcare organizations is establishing a culture that ensures consistent delivery of high-quality, safe, and compassionate health care. Leadership is critical in modeling organizational strategies, cultures, qualities, cultures, and behaviors fundamental in providing safe, quality in-patient and outpatient healthcare services. Therefore, an appropriate leadership approach would help leaders in a health care setting set goals, coach, manage, and provide relevant for team members, usually consisting of professionals from different disciplines. Consequently, an appropriate leadership approach encourages professional development for the health care teams, supports their roles, and communicates. This section establishes a leadership approach to address the inadequacy of practice guidelines to support self-management education among type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients. The section proposes using face-to-face and telephone-based family-oriented instruction to improve T2D self-management. This paper constitutes three parts; (1) an interprofessional approach to implementing the proposed practice change project, (2) guidelines to improving interprofessional communication during and after the project change, and (3) associated leadership ethics.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Interprofessional Collaboration in Leading Project Teams

Projects teams constitute professionals from different disciplines. In an interprofessional team care model, the personnel manages diabetes (Szafran et al., 2019). Personnel in diabetes management include and not limited to specialist nurses, practice nurses, diabetes educators, registered dietitians, podiatrists, ophthalmologists, nutritionists, pharmacists, and psychologists are involved in diabetes management. Therefore, baseline and routine meetings would be crucial in enhancing interprofessional collaboration among project teams.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Routine meetings are crucial in managing interprofessional collaboration (IPC). The sessions provide platforms for a unit leader to communicate leadership structure, roles and responsibilities, and professional boundaries related to specific health needs (Reeves et al., 2017). In this case, routine meetings held through physical or video conferencing would facilitate communication of team roles, equip care teams with appropriate T2D practice skills, help diabetes care teams develop shared diabetes management values, develop mutual respect with each other, the patients, and their families. Therefore, barriers such as interprofessional boundary frictions and poor communication will be mitigated.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Communication Comportment in Project Management

Since different professionals are involved in the project change, clear communication would be critical. In addition, communication is a vital competency for effective collaboration, standardization, and sustainment of health care processes (Busari et al., 2017). For the success of the change project, communication strategies among teams will aim to sustain engagements, respect, and confidentiality by standardizing and documenting operations to promote clear and open communication that encourages staff to speak up against poor communication. Therefore, the facility should adopt standard communication tools such as electronic health records, personal digital assistants, and reminders to help improve timely and robust communication with the care teams.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Doctoral level nurse has comprehensive verbal and non-verbal communications skills crucial to occupying leadership positions, managing health care team, researching, synthesizing, and summarizing evidence-based practice problem. As an individual and a leader of diverse care teams, paying attention to verbal and non-verbal cues are critical to identifying and mitigating challenges faced by the teams. Ideally, DNP-prepared nurses must develop the capability to communicate effectively to facilitate their collaboration with staff, understand patients’ needs, and adopt strategies to improve patient outcomes (Busari et al., 2017). In this context, communication defines an individual’s ability to converse with colleagues and patients effectively. The healthcare team leadership will outline T2D self-management guidelines and communicate to affected patients through face-to-face meetings and telephone calls.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Effective communication through face-to-face meetings or telephone calls would allow T2D patients to understand and consistently implement practical T2D management skills. For instance, maintaining an open and relaxed posture and nodding one’s head while communicating indicates they understand the instructions. Crossing one’s arms indicate their disapproval, unwillingness to listen, or judgmental attitude. As s professional, it is critical to understand the non-verbal cues and avoid or encourage the patients and colleagues to share complete and relevant information.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Leadership Ethics

The project change requires ethical considerations to ensure its success. Critical ethical dilemmas associated with diabetes management include balancing the risk of overtreatment associated with intensifying medical therapy and preventing the future impact of high glucose levels. Equally, clinical pharmacists face the dilemma of choosing additional insulin or prescribing hypoglycemic agents. Usually, a lack of standardized diabetes management guidelines, inadequate drugs, and delayed diagnosis contribute to such dilemmas (Basu & Sharma, 2018). For these reasons, diabetes management is a problem for individuals and health professionals.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

The interprofessional team will work together to identify treatment gaps, which they share with the leadership to guide the way forward. For instance, the interprofessional team will conduct assessments in critical functionalities affected by diabetes, including cognitive abilities, and communicate with the families on effective diabetes management. Through particularistic reasoning and empathic understanding, the care teams will develop rapport with patients and incorporate their needs beyond presenting behavior or symptoms, including the diversity of patients’ cultures. The intervention would balance the need to prevent harm/suffering and the right to self-determination.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

The leadership will define good behavior and interprofessional expectations through consistent meetings depending on the institution’s core values. Equally, the leadership will adopt a seamless reporting framework for bullying cases, document abusive behavior, and support victims. The frameworks would counter barriers to clinical justice, bias, and social injustices. The appropriate reporting framework will enable team members to avoid and solve disagreements and bullying within the clinical setting. On the other hand, the leadership will establish frameworks for routine training on nurse advocacy and create diverse care delivery and virtual care models. Together, the establishments will promote ethical practices in diabetes care.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Leading Practice Change Teams with Innovation and Effective Management.

Creating a future in which health care systems support patients’ self-management of their conditions is deeply entrenched in a leader’s innovativeness and effective management skills. Leaders are obliged to lead teams, advocate for systems change and health policy, and advance efforts to promote effective community health management (Wakefield et al., 2021). The impact of good leadership across the health system is critical to the improved performance, retention of healthcare personnel, and maintenance of health infrastructure.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Leading Through Innovation

Healthcare innovation is crucial for patients’ health care outcomes. Appropriate leadership is necessary to achieve and sustain health care innovations. A leader should promote innovation among nursing teams by diffusing collaborative improvement efforts, expanding opportunities for project team members to lead, and innovating healthcare practice and education (Shalala et al., 2011). Therefore, leaders should advocate for funding to advance research on care models and innovative solutions, including technology, to allow healthcare teams to contribute to health and healthcare. In this case, a leader should establish an environment that enables health care teams to contribute to identifying effective interventions for the self-management of diabetes while soliciting funds to advance the proposed project change. Health teams would help design, develop, implement and evaluate the project change intervention through their nursing knowledge(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample).  

Integrating Leadership and Management Models

Integrating leadership and management models is critical for successful project change identification and implementation. Leadership is challenging and requires a combination of management competency, communication, human relations skill, technical and organizational competence. Transformational leadership and Lewin’s three-stage change model are ideal for the proposed change project. Together, the transformational leadership and Lewin’s three-stage model of change would allow the health institution to identify, implement, and evaluate the proposed intervention.

Transformational leadership style allows a long-term focus on the change project, substituting short-term individual goals with long-term value-based and higher-level goals. Therefore, transformational leadership increases staff commitment to an identified practice change, self-confidence, and satisfaction. When staff is empowered and mentored, their decision to stay in their current position is influenced (Cummings et al., 2018). As a result, the staffs’ involvement and commitment to patient education through face-to-face meetings and telephone calls increases.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Lewin’s three-stage model was founded on the premise that any factor affecting individual behavior affects their capacity to change and that of an entire group. The three stages include unfreezing, change process, and refreezing, whereby unfreezing allows employees to be involved in the change. In contrast, the change process encompasses effective leadership and knowledge sharing through effective communication and collaborations. The refreezing stage involves implementing the proposed change, integrating the transition into the work culture, developing ways to sustain the change, training, and supporting the care teams. Significantly, transformational leadership motivates care teams to align to the proposed intervention and contribute to the practice change project.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Managing Materials and Human Resources

Material and human resources management is a critical role played by healthcare leaders. Materials and human resources are often limited and require effective management to achieve organizational goals.  Effective human resources management strategies are essential to achieving better health care access and associated outcomes (Aburumman et al., 2020). While human resources management focuses on clinical and non-clinical directly involved in health systems and interventions, material management focuses on health systems and administration supplies necessary to meet the organizational targets. For this project, effective material management is critical to providing and using resources for patient education on diabetes self-management. In addition, effective human resource management would be vital in hiring qualified staff, training staff on the proposed intervention, managing variable shifts including staff behaviors, and knowledge on regulatory and legal compliance that can jeopardize successful change project implementation and evaluation. (Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Conclusion

The paper identified a research gap and proposed a relevant intervention—the lack of appropriate clinical guidelines for diabetes self-management education in the endocrinology department. The paper suggests that face-to-face and telephone-based meetings and mHealth applications could improve self-management skills among diabetes patients. However, effective leadership and communication competencies are necessary to facilitate collaboration among interprofessional health care teams to achieve intended health outcomes.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

DNP-trained health care leaders have adequate skills set that allow them to lead effectively, manage interprofessional care teams, research, synthesize and implement evidence-based practice gaps. An effective interprofessional team is critical in sustaining engagements with patients and their families through respect and confidentiality achieved through standardized practices and documented operations. Effective communication also allows health care teams to communicate against ethical dilemmas. In addition, communication enhances quick and accurate information exchange to facilitate effective diabetes self-management education.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

A DNP leader should promote and sustain innovation by advocating for routine training opportunities for staff and funds to implement and sustain change projects. Transformational leadership and Lewin’s three-stage change model are ideal for the proposed change project. Together, the transformational leadership and Lewin’s three-stage model of change would allow the health institution to identify, implement, and evaluate the proposed intervention. The leader should also provide and manage project materials and support effective human resources management to enhance project change and evaluation commitment.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

References

Aburumman, O., Salleh, A., Omar, K., & Abadi, M. (2020). The impact of human resource management practices and career satisfaction on employee turnover intention. Management Science Letters, 10(3), 641-652. (Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)http://dx.doi.org/10.5267/j.msl.2019.9.015

Boels, A. M., Vos, R. C., Dijkhorst-Oei, L. T., & Rutten, G. E. (2019). Effectiveness of diabetes self-management education and support via a smartphone application in insulin-treated patients with type 2 diabetes: Results of a randomized controlled trial (TRIGGER study). BMJ Open Diabetes Research and Care, 7(1), e000981(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Busari, J. O., Moll, F. M., & Duits, A. J. (2017). Understanding the impact of interprofessional collaboration on the quality of care: a case report from a small-scale resource-limited health care environment. Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare, 10, 227. (Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)https://dx.doi.org/10.2147%2FJMDH.S140042

Cummings, G. G., Tate, K., Lee, S., Wong, C. A., Paananen, T., Micaroni, S. P., & Chatterjee, G. E. (2018). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 85, 19-60.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Hemmati Maslakpak, M., Razmara, S., & Niazkhani, Z. (2017). Effects of face-to-face and telephone-based family-oriented education on self-care behavior and patient outcomes in type 2diabetes: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of diabetes research, 2017, 8404328. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/8404328(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)

Reeves, S., Pelone, F., Harrison, R., Goldman, J., & Zwarenstein, M. (2017). Interprofessional collaboration to improve professional practice and healthcare outcomes. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (6). (Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)https://dx.doi.org/10.1002%2F14651858.CD000072.pub3  

Shalala, D., Bolton, L. B., Bleich, M. R., Brennan, T., Campbell, R., & Devlin, L. (2011). The future of nursing: Leading change, advancing health. Washington DC: The National Academy Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12956

Szafran, O., Kennett, S. L., Bell, N. R., & Torti, J. M. (2019). Interprofessional collaboration in diabetes care: perceptions of family physicians practicing in or not in a primary health care team. BMC family practice, 20(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-019-0932-9

Wakefield, M., Williams, D. R., & Le Menestrel, S. (2021). The future of nursing 2020-2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity. National Academy of Sciences.(Professional DNP Leadership Capacity Comprehensive Nursing Paper Sample)