Term Paper on "Organizational Analysis Quality of Nursing Leadership"

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Our healthcare organization excels in this factor. There are five different nursing units, divided by patient diagnosis as the brain injury unit, the spinal cord injury unit, the stroke unit, the orthopedic unit and the pediatrics unit. This high level of decentralization ensures the fact that the nurses are able to take the necessary decisions without having to consult every management level. The nurses are also well represented in the organization committees and are able to express the needs of their departments there and reach common decisions with the management.

3. Management style. The management style is important in denoting the relationship between the nurse leader and the rest of the staff. A successful management would tend to involve the members of the staff in many of the decisions being made and to co-interest them in participating with ideas and actions in the decision making process. This will also have a motivating effect on the staff who will now feel involved.

The style is sufficiently decentralized so as to promote unitary teams among the different segment units. Without a particular separate encouragement, the decentralized style that the organization promotes is also a premise for the staff members participating in decisions made.

4. Personnel policies and programs. This force is related a lot to the capacity of staff members to advance and diversify their careers, at all professional levels of the organization. Besides usual financial incentive, like competitive salaries and benefits, this force also includes the capacity of staff to be mobile between the different units of the organization and for promotion to be accessible.

Advancing is strongly encouraged, but it is often made difficult by the longer period of time that the nurse needs in order to acquire sufficient experience in this segment of medical healthcare with distinct particularities.

5. Professional models of care. This factor is essential in determining the relationship between nurse and patient in what the responsibility for decisions is concerned, for example. A consistent approach to this factor would imply that the decisions that nurses make for their patients' well-being are theirs to make in terms of responsibility and accountability, which would ensure a better correlation with the patients' needs.

This factor is strongly represented in the organization. The nurses are often the most important liaison of the patients with the rest of the world and they ensure that their care needs are well taken care of. The professionalism of the nurses earns extra points for this factor.

6. Quality of care. This factor is very important in determining the way patients are treated in the organization. A high quality of care ranges from professional instruments, to access to the latest medication and to the empowerment of the medical staff to act with their best knowledge in the interest of patients. This is not only something at nurse or doctor level, but something that should be promoted at an organizational level.

The quality of care is at average levels in this organization. Despite the fact that the organization provides 173 patient beds, at this point the facility consists primarily of semi-private rooms. Given the mission of the organization (providing acute rehabilitation services), the need for entirely private room exclusively is predominant. Many of the patients' conditions require the need to have singularly private rooms.

There is also a continuous need for new medical instruments. In this medical segment, the patients' need are so diversified that there is a constant necessity for the latest medical instruments that can improve their conditions. Newer and better performing instruments are a key to delivering results for the patients.

7. Quality Improvement. The nurses' participation in the process of quality improvement ensures the fact that nurses, as the first liaison to patients, are able to provide the appropriate feedback and induce any qualitative change that might be needed. Their participation is thus related to the informational role that they can provide, together with the subsequent application of improvement decisions made at an organizational level.

The nurses are able to provide informational feedback on the quality of care to the management, however, many of the decisions that are made are strictly determined by the available budget and some of the purchases for new instruments are turned down, because of a limited budget. Another problem that may appear is that the budget is set for the entire fiscal year and it is sometimes insufficient to finance need that might appear throughout the year.

8. Consultation and resources. Consultation and resources ensures that the organization is a learning organization. This means that the appropriate instruments are provided for each nurse to be able to learn on the job by receiving advice and knowledge feedback from nurses or other medical staff that have had more experience, but also by tools such as training seminars or applications.

This factor can be ranked as average and the main reason for this is not necessarily the capacity of the organization to provide consultation instruments and resources, but the fact that the patients generally require full time attention and there is little time left for consultation services.

9. Autonomy. The autonomy factors is well matched by the professional care factors in that the nurses are empowered by this factor to make the decisions that might need to be made in a certain situation without having to go up the chain of command in order to clear that decision with other decision making factors. This however also implies a high level of responsibility and accountability for the team and the respect for professional standards.

The nurses are autonomous in the decisions they make, although there is always a good level of consultation with other important entities involved, especially the therapists, who play an essential role in the healthcare organization's activity, and physicians. On the other hand, as previously mentioned, nurses are empowered with the capacity of making decisions for the patients' care.

10. Community and the hospital. Despite the fact that this cannot be applied per se for a hospital, this factor is translated into social responsibility and defines the relationship between the hospital and the community from which it is part. A hospital consistent with this factor will reach out to the community from which it is part with useful programs and will interrelate with its members.

The organization's relationship with the community is based both on the organization's size (173 beds only in the acute rehabilitation units) and the length of the company's history (50 years in the field). This provides the premises for the organization's long-term presence in the community and its involvement at taking on difficult cases and contributing to the community's existence.

11. Nurses as teachers. Previously, we have discussed the factor that showed the nurses as learners in a learning organization. This factor refers to nurses being a teaching factor as well in the learning organization. This goes from exchanging information with peers to delivering information to newer or less experienced members of the staff. An organization consistent with this factor will be an organization that exchange information on all.

This factor is definitely present within the organization, at all nursing levels. As previously mentioned, give the applied needs of the patients, many of the nurses have a long-time experience and are strongly encouraged to pass on from their experience to the newer personnel. This is often… READ MORE