Healthcare Leadership in Terms of Quality and Safety Activities Essay Example

Chapter 1: Introduction

The leaders in a healthcare setting have both a legal and moral obligation to ensure that the patients who are under their care are provided with high quality health services and adequate safety measures are undertaken to improve their care level. The managers are optimally placed to formulate and implement policies, systems, procedures and organizational climates that should have a positive impact on quality of healthcare and safety measures that are undertaken in a hospital or other healthcare institution. There is both empirical and non-empirical evidence that will be discussed further in the background and literature review section of this paper illustrating the importance of healthcare managers in improving the quality of care and patient safety in hospitals. Therefore, hospital boards should take punitive measures to improve quality and safety outcomes in their institutions.

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Even beyond the healthcare setting, there is evidence that there are leadership factors such as managerial attitudes and efforts that have an impact on workplace safety in terms of the employees' performance (which is determined by the quality of their work), and safety levels. Within the scientific literature journals, there are articles that focus on aspects such as managerial attitudes and efforts that can lead to the improvement of safety and quality within the healthcare sector. There is also empirical evidence from opinion articles and editorials that provide insightful suggestions and recommendations on the actions that the leadership in a healthcare setting can undertake to improve the quality and safety levels in the organizations that they manage. However, there is also existing evidence that provide indications that there is limited evidence in relation to this topic that the researcher is interested in, and therefore, it presents him with an opportunity to provide new information that he will share with other interested parties such as other scholars and key stakeholders in the healthcare industry. It is also important to point out that there is literature review, which focus on the difficulties of this managerial role and the negative results of poor leadership in the healthcare setting when it comes to quality and safety levels that are maintained in the healthcare setting.

1.2 Background of the Study

In a majority of the healthcare setting, the key stakeholders in these institutions (management, doctors and nurses) are striving to attain a highly reliable environment where quality of the services that are provided and safety measures are observed. Indeed, health workers that interact with patients on a regular basis such as doctors and nurses are in the best position to identify harzardous situations in their work environment and come up with solutions to address the existing system flaws. Traditionally, the concept of leadership in the organizational setting has been considered a role of the top management such as the CEO, and human resource management. However, doctors and health supervisors can also play a critical leadership role in terms of acting as change agents in how quality care and high safety levels in the healthcare setting are guaranteed. They can influence change through prioritization of safety, responding to the patients' concerns, supporting efforts by their subordinates on improving quality of the services that they provide, and monitoring progress of the patients that are under their care. Research on this topic points out that there is a positive correlation between effective leadership actions and patient safety, which is determined by organizational behaviours and structures that promote on the safety efforts.

1.2.1 Historical Role of Healthcare Leadership in terms of Quality and Safety Activities

Hospitals are mainly overseen by a board of directors. Their responsibilities are: formulation of organizational mission and key goals, ensuring that the organization is financially viable, monitoring and evaluating employees' performance. They also have a mandate to ensure that the healthcare organization meets the needs of the community members that it services and ensure that their organization provides high quality and safe care on its patients on a regular basis. However, even though the hospital boards are provided with this mandate, traditionally or in most healthcare settings, they have little direct engagement in issues such as evaluation and improvement of quality and safety in the healthcare setting. It is also important to point that in a majority of cases, the board members in the healthcare setting are mainly community leaders who were in other professions and therefore lack the knowledge to interpret complex data on both the quality and safety of care. Therefore, these boards lack the ability to address quality issues that may be brought about by certain healthcare workers such as practicing physicians, especially the ones that have not been directly employed by a hospital.

It is also important to point out that even though the board of directors are held accountable for the quality and safety of care that is provided by their organizations, there are studies that show that improvement of quality is not ranked among the top priorities of a majority of the board of directors. According to a study by Jha and Epstein (2010), they found out that in more than 700 hospital board of directors, only a minority figure focused on improving the quality of care in their institutions. However, recently, there have been efforts to improve the situation mainly because of data driven evidence that shows the impact, or influence of leadership engagement on improving quality care and overall safety.

1.2.2 How Leadership Can Lead to the Improvement of Patient Safety

As has been shown before, there is existing evidence that illustrate a positive association between the leadership in a healthcare setting and the overall hospital performance in terms of quality and safety metrics. In a study by Millar, Mannion, Freeman and Davies (2013) it illustrated evidence that high-performing healthcare institutions are the ones that rank highly when it comes to objective measures such as on quality and safety. In such healthcare institutions, the management was highly skilled when it came to quality and safety issues, and devoted a majority of their time in discussing on how to improve the quality and safety measures in their institutions.

According to another study by Tsai et al. (2015), in the US and England hospitals, the researchers found out that the leaders of high-quality hospitals applied effective management practices to monitor and improve quality of care. The practices that they implemented in their organizations included: the use of data to enhance the quality and level of care that they provided to their patients both in terms of specific quality goals and monitoring the performance das...