Aim: This assessment provides the student the opportunity to apply and evaluate leadership styles in a scenario involving a change process.
A recent state-wide quality improvement project has shown that an electronic medical record system improves com- munication between health care providers and many aspects the individual patient’s care. In order to share this knowledge, the state organization has shared the results on a quality improvement website.
The Local Health District that you work for has recently had some critical incidents where communication has been cited as a root cause. These critical incidents occur in the context of a general increase of minor communication incidents over the last three years.
The Local Health district’s executive team including the senior Nurse Leaders have reviewed the information on the state’s quality improvement website.
The Nurse Leader of the two hundred bed hospital you work in calls the Nurse Unit Managers for a meeting and advises of the general trending increase in communication errors. The Nurse Leader advises that the computer hardware and systems will be available for installation in two months and that there is an expectation that all wards will have adopted the electronic medical record system within six months.
Discuss how an effective Nurse Unit Manager would lead this change to address this important patient safety issue. The essay will need to:
– Discuss reasons, using support from the literature, to adopt the fully electronic medication system – Use Lewin’s model to outline a plan of change that includes milestones and time frames.
– Choose and apply a leadership style to the plan of change.
– Critically evaluate the choice and compare with at least one other leadership style.
– Describe two aspects of potential resistance and discuss how the resistance might be addressed.
