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Essay On Effective Approaches In Leadership And Management

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Effective Approaches in Leadership and Management
The issue of nursing shortage and nurse turnover is an all too familiar challenge hospital administrators, directors and managers deal with on an everyday basis. The number of nurses enrolled in nursing programs can’t keep up with the demand and the need of health care organizations for highly trained and competent professional nurses (Purnell, Horner, Gonzalez, & Westman, 2001). Insufficient staffing leads to distressed and overworked nurses, impacting their job satisfaction. Consequently, despondent nurses are leaving the profession altogether once they become disengaged and frustrated. Managers and leaders need to be innovative and adaptive in employing leadership skills to address this
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The nursing shortage and high nurse turnover rates can be attributed to various factors, including low job satisfaction, concerns with on the job injuries and work environment, retention issues and limited number of nursing faculty to prepare prospective nurses. According to JCAHO (n.d.), 41 percent of registered nurses expressed dissatisfaction with their current roles and an alarming statistic of 55 percent conveyed that they would not encourage a career in nursing due to their dismay on the profession. Certainly, there are a number of reasons why nurses are dissatisfied, but all lead to frequent turnover and decreased retention of qualified nurses. With added duties due to staffing issues, disheartened nurses complain that time to care for patients is significantly diminished. On the other hand, administrators and managers grumble that fewer nurses are competent enough to handle patients who are acutely ill in a complex and rapidly changing health care field (Purnell et al., 2001).
Given this nursing shortage and associated challenges, managers and leaders need to search for a unified vision, present ideas and turn these into strategies to help alleviate this health care issue. A manager and a leader, terms that are often used interchangeably, need to be unified in their actions while carrying out their specific roles and duties. A manager concerns himself/herself with managing resources and structure while a
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