Locate a state or national coalition advocating for your approved healthcare policy concern.

Locate a state or national coalition advocating for your approved healthcare policy concern. Who are the coalition partners and is there an identified leader? Can you identify successes indicating strong leadership? What can you add to the content for your upcoming interview from the work of this coalition?

MN577 Advanced Nursing Practice: Discussion Board: Contraceptive Counselling

Contraceptive counseling provides education, dispels misinformation, facilitates selection of a method that will be successful for the individual, and encourages patient involvement in healthcare decisions and life goals. Discussing contraception brings the nurse practitioner and patient together to create a tailored plan that meets the individual’s reproductive needs over a lifetime.

Discussion:

Discuss any clinical encounters that you may have had relating to contraception. How did you counsel patients on their choices and possible risks?

Describe how you would explain the differences to your patients in the long acting reversal contraceptive device

nursing leadership

To be a change agent means to simply facilitate change. The change agent is responsible for translating changes into plans and executing them while also motivating and encouraging others to achieve the desire results (Nurse Leader, 2017). As a leader, I have been a change agent on many occasions. I am the responsible person for training and enforcing policy changes in the clinic. Change does not always (if ever) go over smoothly with my team. One scenario in specific stands out to me. Recent changes in leadership at our facility have created some chaos at the clinic. Annual clinical competencies have always been completed and reported in the same manner. When the new leadership came, the entire evaluation and competency program was revamped. Although this was for the better, the staff had a difficult time adjusting. After being given my guidelines, I was responsible for creating a plan to get all of the skills organized. This included making a schedule to have everyone observed and signed off, educating staff where needed, and reporting the results to my leadership. I motivated the team with words of encouragement. “How fortunate are we to work for a facility that not only keeps us accountable, but also aids in our continued education to help us be as informed as possible. We are able to provide better care to our patients because we are better educated.”

Another nurse at my facility (also a member of leadership) is often times a change agent as well. She has a way of wording things to sound pleasant when they may not be. In this way, she encourages and motivates our team to take active roles in changes around the clinic that they may otherwise shy away from. The staff are more engaged with changes when they feel involved. This makes a smoother transition for everyone.

Comment 1

My executive summary will be on change of shift admissions and effects on patient care. Change of shift is a vulnerable time for both patients and nurses. During change of shift, critical informatin regarding patients is communicated to the on-coming nurse and ancillary staff. Interuptions during hand-off, including admissions and transfers may hinder the integrity of communication between nurses and delay the completion of critical patient-centered tasks. I would like to create a policy to decrease the flow of traffic during critical shift change times between the hours of 7:15am-8:15am and 7:15pm-8:15pm.

Comment 2

I would like to describe differing approaches of nursing leaders and managers to issues in practice when discussing nurse-staffing ratios. This is a big issue in the country because aside from California, legally mandated nurse-staffing ratios do not exist. When it is discussed in the hospital now, nursing supervisors discourage it by telling nurses that it is not all it’s cracked up to be. Some hospitals can go under due to the need to staff appropriately. When talking to a nurse who has worked under both situations, she has said that the cost of healthcare ends up declining in a good way because nurses are making less overworked mistakes and patient-satisfaction is up. This can be the big difference between managers and leaders in the big picture of things. Managers will listen to nursing complaints of being overworked beyond safe circumstances and the manager will simply say, “this is what you signed up for when you became a nurse,” like we’re soldiers complaining about being shot at when we chose to be a soldier. We signed up for nursing to care for patients and participate in the optimization of their help. Leaders will listen to nursing complaints and ask themselves what can they do to help. At the end of the day, if more people were leaders, nursing shortages may not exist. Nurses would be happier and stay in their positions longer.