The Significance of Mentorship and Leadership in Nursing
Nursing mentorship can be defined as the supervision, facilitation, and induction of nursing students in the medical field. Therefore, clinical nursing mentorship is the role of teaching and assessing nursing students in a practical setting (Peiser, Ambrose, & Davenport, 2018). This study aims to evaluate the significance of mentorship in nursing and identifies how collaborative leadership styles can be used in various healthcare settings to improve nursing leader’s roles.
The role of the mentors in the nursing practice placements is essential because it helps to support the student learning and assessment processes. Hence, it is crucial to establish a productive relationship between the mentor and the students by offering objective and analytical support. However, negative mentorship experiences can have detrimental effects on both the mentor and the students as a result of the dysfunctional relationship. The student-mentor relationship is crucial to the nursing student’s learning experience for it is a process that involves the students’ assessment practice. Moreover, it is the responsibility of the mentor to evaluate and assess the student’s fitness in the clinical field. Therefore, it is upon the mentor to establish a combination of the functional capability and theory and to see to it that the nursing student becomes a competent health practitioner, and to assist the student in making sound therapeutic judgments (Peiser, Ambrose, & Davenport, 2018).
For the student’s nurses to deliver quality healthcare, they require clinical reasoning skills which enable the students to interpret and handle clinical decisions, as well as retrieve crucial clinical and patients data. These skills and strategies can only be achieved with the right mentorship program and approaches which are refined and developed as the students’ progress in their careers.
Consequently, a multidimensional mentorship approach is required to ensure that nursing students attain adequate competency. Therefore, the students should seek inspiration from their mentors as their role models who can demonstrate sufficient care for patients (Nguyen, 2018). A good mentor is a nurturing teacher with adequate experience, knowledgeable, and one who recognizes the significance of the interpersonal relationship, and understands their responsibility towards maintaining professional standards in the nursing practice. However, it is upon the mentor to exercise caution while dealing with the nursing student and set clear goals, and boundaries that will ensure their role is not compromised (Regan, Laschinger, & Wong, 2016). Subsequently, the responsibilities and functions should be stated and defined in the begging of the placement process. This will help both the student and the mentor to have realistic expectations from the student-mentor relationship.
Part II
Identify how collaborative leadership styles might be utilized in various community agencies to enhance the role of the nurse leader.
Nursing leadership is the individual’s behavior involved in directing nursing practitioners toward a shared or common healthcare objective. Therefore, the crucial role of nursing leadership consists of the influence of nursing group activities and developing approaches to dealing with the challenges they face (Yoder-Wise, 2019). For nurses to fully contribute and transform the healthcare delivery system, they must become effective leaders in all the activities they conduct within the health care setting. Hence, nurse leaders are required to participate and lead in the health care delivery reforms within the system, and be able to direct evidence-based research, as well as implement research findings in the practical field (Regan, Laschinger, & Wong, 2016). According to Peiser, Ambrose, & Davenport (2018), nurses are an excellent source of knowledge and are more aware of the needs of their patients, the community, and the families of the patients.
However, most nurses are excluded from the decision-making processes and are more than often relegated to carry out the instructions of their seniors (Thomas, 2015). Consequently, some of the nursing leadership approaches that can be adapted to optimize healthcare management include, transformational leadership, which goes beyond the traditional leadership style and focuses on a sense of mission to organize, supervise and lead group performance. For the transformational leadership approach to work effectively, the mentors have to clearly communicate their mission and insights for quality healthcare delivery in a way that is easy to understand and apply to promote a collective purpose and develop the right strategies of implementation. This approach requires the nursing leaders to effectively communicate their vision for healthcare in a meaningful and exciting method that creates a collective purpose and unity (Nguyen, 2018). Other theories of leadership in nursing include conflict management and resolution, shared leadership, distributed leadership, ethical leadership, functional and results-oriented healthcare leadership (Peiser, Ambrose, & Davenport, 2018).
Nursing leaders and mentors have a key responsibility for ensuring that their juniors work effectively to deliver quality healthcare. Therefore, they must develop effective communication approaches because miscommunication can adversely impact on the way they deliver healthcare and most patients may find it difficult to understand the healthcare practitioners with insufficient communication strategies. Most importantly, a leader should employ effective strategies such as mediation, seeking consensus, competition, accommodate collaboration, facilitate effective communication methods, and offer practical solutions.
References
Nguyen, V. N., Forbes, H., Mohebbi, M., & Duke, M. (2018). The effect of preparation strategies, qualification and professional background on clinical nurse educator confidence. Journal of advanced nursing.
Peiser, G., Ambrose, J., Burke, B., & Davenport, J. (2018). The role of the mentor in professional knowledge development across four professions. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 7(1), 2-18.
Regan, S., Laschinger, H. K., & Wong, C. A. (2016). The influence of empowerment, authentic leadership, and professional practice environments on nurses’ perceived interprofessional collaboration. Journal of nursing management, 24(1), E54-E61.
Thomas, T. (2015). Management and leadership for nurse administrators. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
Yoder-Wise, P. S. (2019). Clinical Safety: The Core of Leading, Managing, and Following. Leading and Managing in Nursing, 20.