Importance of Sustainable Change

Discuss about the Leadership role in Facilitating Change.

The successful organisation change depends on its managers and leaders who have direct authority to guide individuals who are going through change they need to providing support during execution of change process (Casali & Day, 2010). The key elements of sustainable change are goal, motivation, self-confidence, self-monitor and willpower. These elements will be developed by leaders while introducing change process in the organisation. In Health care environment the performance system is considered as an essential part which helps in measuring and developing process. To analyse the role of leader introducing change process in workplace the topic has been selected is Patients safety and care. The essay is designed with the purpose of describing the role of leader in change process to improve the performance of employees in the work place, elaborating the leadership styles which will help leaders in improving performance of staff with the help of change process in organisation, stating the required to support change theory for implementing performance improvement in the work culture, the importance of consideration of an organisation mission, vision and strategic goals while considering work change impact of work culture on the patients and their families, the barriers of change process  and facilitators to success of change and to know importance planning and implementation of changes related to change in work place and strategies to manage changes.

Patient safety and care give more emphases on safety and health care by prevention, reporting, reduction and analysis of medical errors which leads to hostile effects. Patient safety arises as different health care discipline which reinforced by scientific framework. Satisfaction among patients is very important for measuring the quality of health care and patient’s safety (Fisher, Gonzalez & Fisher, 2016).  The safety of patients plus their family members need to consider in patient safety. With the introduction of new technologies, methods of treatments and medicines the conditions of health care become more complex as well as more effective. Economic pressure on the health care system is increasing pressure on the health care environment.

Leaders involved in the activities of patient safety and care develop the norms to maintaining good health environment. A good leader is a prime necessity of any organisation and it is also important in Health sector. A good leader should have an efficiency of creating a good working environment for professionals and safe environment for patients and patient’s family members.

Leadership Styles to Improve Employee Performance

There are various responsibilities involve in patient safety and care. As the nurses spend much more time in comparison to other staff members with patients and their family members, so nurses should consider being incharge of Patients safety and care. The nurses are accountable for developing safe and healthy environment at workplace. To improve the conditions of working style it important that the management of hospital must choose a leader over nurses. The leader can be appointed among the existing nurses or it can be some outsider (Verstappen, et.al. 2015). But choosing the leader among the existing staff will provide benefits to hospital as the selected leader will be person who already knows the positive and negative both aspects of hospital can apply their skill directly toward making conditions of hospital better.  To provide best quality care and safety to patients the most important source is appointing clinical nurse leaders.

The roles performed by the Clinical nurse leaders are they encourage their followers to be active and take part actively in the quality change process. The leader is responsible for delivering expected standards for care and safety in the hospital. Maintaining standard of safety in the hospital is a prime responsibility of Clinical Nurse leader (Walberg et al. 2006). The effective leader will help the team by improving their performance, developing team work and by improving quality and safety standards (Guo and Anderson, 2005).The leaders need to observe the behaviour of the nursing staff that how they are behaving with the patients, their family members and with other staff members if the leader find any gap between the performance of the staff it becomes a duty of leader to ask them to improve their behaviour as per the norms set by the hospital (Zhu, et.al. 2015).  The Clinical nurse leader majorly focuses on safety and care of patients and patients family there are seven subgroups required by the CNL to maintain the culture of safety these are cooperation, communication, learning, leadership, evidence-based care, fairness and patient-centeredness. The CNL is responsible for assigning duties to the other nursing staff, the nurse leader will assign the duties in such manner which will help the nurses in improving their performance at work. The leader needs to think creatively that will help in getting new idea to improve the performance of the existing staff members. Arranging a proper training and development program for staff nurses is also a responsibility of CNL.

Support Theory for Change Implementation

To enhance the performance level of staff and to introduce change many health organisation uses various leadership styles such as Cairns Private Hospital, the leader ship style will enhance the Patient care and safety service effectively and efficiently. The first leadership style introduces by the hospital is transformation leadership style which will help in developing positive relationship and motivating individual staff members. Transformational leaders are those who are more passionate, focused and charismatic. The transformational leadership style considers being a standard in the Clinical nursing leadership style it provides excessive satisfaction in the job and promotes improved patients outcomes. The transformational leadership style is considered as essential components for patient safety and care by various health councils (Needleman, et.al. 2016).

Next leadership style used by the CNL to motivate staff members in improving their performance is Transitional leadership style. The transitional leader believes in inspiring their employees by reward or punishment to get work done by them. The transitional leader’s emphasis more on getting work done by the staff through reward or punishment the main focus of leader is accomplishment of tasks. The transitional leaders have faith in either negative or positive, procedures, rules or standards to gain compliance (Strom, Sears & Kelly, 2014).

The CNL can also use Autocratic leadership style. The Autocratic leadership is evidenced when the conclusion made by the leader without bearing in mind other inputs. The Autocratic leader is the person who uses punishment and negative reinforcement to impose the rules. In the Autocratic leadership style the leader blame individual rather blaming the group. The Autocratic leadership style is not work in the daily work situation, it become helpful in case of emergency when time is less for making collaboration or discussion. Autocratic leadership style helps in implementation of policies and producers, but it does not encourage communication and build trust (Vargas, 2015).

The one more leadership style is there which leader can use to maintain the performance standard is Laissez Faire Leadership style also widely known as absence of leadership. The Laissez Faire Leadership style promote the model of personnel management, which allow the staff  members to get engaged in the activities like care and safety of patients without straight guideline and control. But this leadership style can be dangerous for the hospital working conditions as the leadership style develop the culture of blame. However the Laissez faire leadership style, also shown up as an operative leadership tool when the working members are highly skilled and motivated (Renko, et.al. 2015).      

Alignment with Mission/Vision/Goals

Another leadership style is there which leaders can use to enhance the safety and care of patients, that is Democratic leadership style. Democratic leadership style is a tool to encourage the nurses to communicate and contributes openly in process of decision making. The leaders who follow the Democratic leadership style focus on developing relationship with the purpose of job satisfaction and staff development. And the main purpose of the leadership style is to improve the process and system, rather than blaming the individual staff member. However the process of decision making got slow down due to increased participation of team members (Renko, et.al. 2015).

Kurt Lewin has developed the change model which involve three steps these are Unfreezing, Changing and Refreezing. The first step of change will prepare the organisation to accept that why change is necessary, which involve breaking down the status quo before building a new way of operation. After the uncertainty created in the unfreeze stage, the change step will arrive where employees begin to resolve their uncertainty and look forward to accept new changes. When the changes take shape and employees embraced the new ways of working and the organisation is ready to refreeze (Schein, 1996).       

To implement the process for change in organisation the leaders need to follow some steps which will help the leader in enhancing the conditions of workplace by motivating the staff personnel to improve their performance. The first step the leaders need to take during the process, the leader should be aware of the issues due to which the working performance of staff members has become poor, and the leader should know the reason due to which the employees are struggling with their performance. In some case the members are not performing due to some personal reason, in such cases the leader should show their concern and need to tackle the conditions very humbly. It is important for the leader to go to the depth of the issues which includes uncover and hidden facts (Blais, 2015). In next step the leader will design the improvement plan and for that the leader will involve the employees. The employees really got excited when the leaders involve them in plan making, they got a chance to add their perspectives and drop their idea in the plan that will make them feel important part of the organisation. But the right of decision is lies with the management or leader to select employee’s suggestion or not, if they like the suggestion then only they will select it otherwise they will design their improvement plan accordingly (Tyczkowski, et.al. 2015).  

Barriers and Facilitators to Change

In next step the leader will implement the designed plan with the desired objectives. The leader needs to describe the objectives to employees clearly, about what the leader wants from the employees and how they are going to measures their performance level. The leader needs to check that the designed objectives and targets are real and can be performed by the employees within a given time frame. In continuation the leader will arrange the training and development program and they will provide full assistance to staff member during training because the main root behind performance downfall is of employees (Wollum, 2015). Training and development is an integral part of performance improvement plan. Before developing the training and development program the leaders need to identify the gap between the existing performance level and desired performance level. The properly held training and development programme will really helpful in developing work understanding and capacity building. After providing proper training and development the leader need to set the regular dates to review the level of performance and progress. These steps will really help the leaders in improving the performance of staff.

There are various steps consider while making organisation strategic plan. Strategic plan often means move toward change. Change is the essential part of strategic planning it will includes steps to create change in something. Leaders should give emphasis to the recent mission to an employee which clarifies the primary purpose of change. And like mission statement vision statement describe the organisation purpose (Gill, 2002). The work cultures of the hospitals provide its influence on the mind of patients and their family members. The quality care mainly depends on two factors that are access to care and effectiveness of care. If the care quality of the hospital is not up to mark than that will build negative image of the hospital (Damiani, et.al. 2016).  The leaders and hospital management need to make assure that the facilities which the hospital is providing will satisfy needs of the patients. The patient’s safety is most important for both hospital and patients. If hospital or leader fails to provide safety to patients than the profits of the organisation will go down as nobody will take interest in taking treatment from that particular hospital. The safety is main criteria and if leaders fail to provide safety to its patients that will influence the market conditions. Patients’ satisfaction is the most important part of any work or business, if customer or patients will not get satisfaction they will switch to other service providers (Birken, et.al. 2015).

Strategies to Manage Change

There are various type of barriers attached with the change process the most common and prevalent barrier for performance enhancement is resistance to change, it is human nature if anything new take place in the work culture they will show their resistance toward change because they have to make extra efforts to cope with new changes and the staff wants to remain in their comfort zone, it is very difficult for leaders to overcome this barrier. The next barrier is absence of commitment toward enhancement of performance, many physicians, managers, administrators and other staff members interpret that performance enhancement is not an essential task. Performance independence such as prior review and physician history of self-governance can be treated as a barrier. Health care organisation has scarce resources and the performance enhancement as an activity which involves huge cost so many organisation not take much interest in planning performance improvement programme (Aydin, et.al. 2015). In culture of health care system the game of shame and blame and fear associated with the undesirable performance and medical errors. The serious issues among department and professionals are considering being a barrier. There are many restrictions imposed by the organisation due to that staff is not been able to participate in performance improvement activities. One more barrier is during the performance enhancement activities every team member and other come with their personal agenda and during programme they work toward their personal goals and due to that the main aim of performance enhancement activity will not get fulfilled (Heathfield, 2017).  The concept of performance enhancement is very complex and unwieldy.

Facilitation is the process which provides support to group of individual or to individuals to attain a valuable change. It also defines as a process of opportunities, support and resource encouragement for the groups so they can achieve their objectives. This process enables the group to take responsibility and control in the health care system. A facilitator can be defined as a catalyst for change or as a person who provides direction and helps to others by designing their own experience. The facilitator’s gears consist of skills, techniques, knowledge and primary skills for structuring a process of change (Lin, et.al, 2015).

There are few management strategies are designed by a hospital to improve the working conditions and to facilitate the proper care and safe environment for patients and their family members, firstly the CNL of hospital need to focus on the working style of the team and they need to evaluate their current performance, in this step the past records of the staff will help CNL in identifying the loopholes in the performance of the staff. It is very important for leader to find the gaps between staffs current performance and desired performance. When the leader will come to know about the gaps or reason behind the loopholes in the performance on the bases of their analysis they will design the new performance enhancement strategy which will help leader in bringing change in the hospital. The process designed by the leader should be that much efficient that could help them in bringing improvement in the organisation (Zohar & Polachek, 2014). When the leader is ready with the effective strategy then the leader will deliver it to their team members, so they can know about the planned strategy. With the introduction of planned strategy it is very important for the leader to motivate their team members.

Importance of Clinical Nurse Leaders

Change management is the formal way of communicating with employees and to increase the efficiency of staff members the leaders need to design change management process which will help the organisation in attaining their goals. In health care sector also change process play very important role. There are various strategies designed by the leaders to improve the work quality and to engage staff members to accept the change that will improve the quality of Patient care and safety. By improving the performance of the health care staff the patient care and safety will automatically get better so the leaders need to concentrate on change process management to keep the health environment healthy.

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