The Role of the Nurse Leader

Nurse Leader Roles
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Nurse Leader Roles Introduction             Nurse leaders can play a big role in identifying and assessing CLABSI by assuming educator roles and employing demonstration-based proficiency to enhance nurses’ knowledge of the complication. Staff education is a critical way nurse leaders can help in defining, identifying, and assessing the problem. A useful way nurse leaders can help in determining the scope and frequency of CLABSI in healthcare institutions is through outcome and process performance measures. Outcome measures entail collecting outcome measure data to assess CLABSI rates in a patient population while process measures involve evaluating adherence to best practices in preventing CLABSIs, starting with high priority practices to low priority practices. Nurse leaders can also provide support for research and the need for change by stressing the guideline recommendations for preventing CLABSI including maintaining hand hygiene, avoiding the femoral site as much as possible, applying chlorhexidine skin preparation, ensuring a sterile field when inserting the line, and using full-barrier precautions during central venous catheter insertion (Saint, Kowalski, Holl, & Forman, 2010). Additionally, they can also provide support with planning and implementation of improvement strategies through frequent and effective communication, fostering a team culture, identifying and empowering exemplary staff members, and providing positive feedback and reinforcement. Communication with Stakeholders Nurse leadership involves advocacy and negotiation in all roles and domains of nursing practice including clinical, academic, research, and policy settings. It is not restricted to formal, appointed positions but also happens in the informal roles that nurses assume. At the basic level, nurse leaders are expected to communicate with patients about hospital policies and also serve as their advocates. Nurse leaders are always interacting with the patients and are therefore in a better position to understand patients’ wants and preferences more than doctors or even hospital administrators. Consequently, they can communicate patients’ problems, experiences, and needs to attending physicians as well as the hospital managers. Nurse leaders also constantly cooperating with other nurses and serve a mediating role between frontline staff and institutional administrators. They are responsible for communicating managerial policies to their peers and enforcing change. At the same, they have a duty to communicate staff issues to hospital executives including such matters as budget allocation, policy prioritization, and shift times (Ennis, Happell, Broadbent, & Searl, 2013). Moreover, nurse leaders are also in a position to advice policymakers of the hospital. Given their extensive experience and numerous mediating roles, nurse leaders are in the best position to communicate and advise the board of directors about policies related to safety regulations, working conditions, health care reform, funding, and etcetera. Nurse leaders can also regularly communicate with research bodies and national policymakers about ways of ...