Leadership in Health Care
There are various challenges experienced when it comes to leadership in health care. The majority of these challenges arise from the fact that most theories on leadership are best for business settings. It then becomes difficult to apply such ideas in real healthcare with the management having to overlook or come up with other ways of doing things. There is a likelihood that the application of such behavioral leadership theories may interfere with relationships among staff members given that healthcare comprises of various professional groups and specialists who might have nonlinear interactions among them. Despite all the following, leadership in health care has significant roles to play in patient care and the outcomes of these organizations. The following is an outline of the different forms of leadership used in health care.
Leadership in health care facilities and organizations aims at bettering service delivery and understanding among staff members. Different management for these agencies, therefore, employ various means of exercising leadership to achieve this. One of the most used forms of leadership is collaborative leadership in which information is passed among co-workers and departments while giving them an allowance for their decision making. Shared leadership and distributed leadership are also widely used in healthcare organizations. With shared leadership staff members are largely involved in the decision making when it comes to issues pertaining to the organization while distributed leadership allows for wide distribution of responsibility and initiatives among health care providers and the management (Al-Sawai, 2013).
From the beginning, it was apparent that there was the existence of numerous challenges when it comes to leadership in health care. Based on the above mentioned, there is a need to come up with other leadership forms to help in addressing such challenges. Conflict management and ethical leadership are some of the ways used by management when dealing with such problems. Despite collaboration being among the techniques of leadership in health care, conflicts could arise at times, therefore; through conflict management techniques such as meditation the management must be able to tackle it. Ethical leadership is required to help protect staff working conditions and interests (Al-Sawai, 2013).
Proper management and leadership among medical staff have numerous benefits to the patient and the organization at large. First of all, high performance among hospitals is directly related to skilled and qualified management. This management ensures regular monitoring activities in hospitals while at the same time promptly responding to rising issues among other things. Patient care and patient safety are also improved due to the management’s adherence to the set rules and regulations pertaining to patient care (AHRQ Patient Safety Network, 2016).
References
Al-Sawai, A. (2013). The leadership of Healthcare Professionals: Where Do We Stand? Oman Medical Journal, 28(4), 285–287. http://doi.org/10.5001/omj.2013.79
AHRQ Patient Safety Network. (2016). Organizational Leadership And Its Role In Improving Safety. Retrieved from https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primers/primer/32/organizational-leadership-and-its-role-in-improving-safety
