As a nurse, you serve an important role in identifying strategies to effectively manage health care resources and in leading health care quality improvement. You must be able to decide what leadership style or strategy to apply in a given situation to achieve an effective resolution of the issue. Read the following two scenarios and select one to focus on in this Discussion. Consider the leadership style or strategy that might be most effective in the scenario you selected.
SCENARIO 1
You work in a for-profit nursing home, with about 100 beds, on a 20-bed unit that is largely patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Your patient mix is predominantly Medicare and Medicaid patients. Your nursing home is part of a larger system that includes a major medical center, as well as VNA, outpatient dialysis, and a fully integrated network. Your nurse manager is getting feedback from the hospital that your nursing home is sending too many patients to the ED who really don’t need to go. How would you go about figuring out what could be done at the nursing home to prevent avoidable ED visits?
SCENARIO 2
You’ve been associated with an outpatient cardiology clinic that is part of a large academic medical center. Your patients are mostly charity care and managed Medicaid. Most have a prescription plan, but none have a “family doctor” and use the clinic (and the ED) regularly. Most are unfamiliar with their medications and do not have the resources for care coordination in their family/social network. About 25 CHF patients have been “lovingly,” but inappropriately, called “frequent fliers” because of their inability to manage their own care, their frequent visits to the ED, and their “one night stays” paid at the observation rate. As a staff nurse in this clinic, describe the strategies you could devise for you and your fellow staff nurses targeting these 25 patients. Find at least one article from the professional literature to corroborate your recommendations.
Select one of the scenarios, and post the following:
Describe the most appropriate leadership style and/or strategy to apply in the scenario you chose in order to implement the recommendations successfully. Justify your selection.
