Leadership Skills
Numerous leadership skills can be important for a nurse leader. Among other things, having a level of business and financial competence is essential. It is especially true for nurses who are engaged in project management. For instance, a quality improvement project aimed at reducing catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) would require business skills, including planning, organizing, and budgeting (Gunawan & Aungsuroch, 2017). Here, two articles that describe this aspect of nursing leadership will be presented to determine the components of business skills and confirm their value.
Business skills are a rather diverse category, which can incorporate multiple competencies. The article by Gunawan and Aungsuroch (2017) provides a conceptual analysis of what they describe as managerial competence, and it is comparable to business skills. The goal was to present the definitions of the different components of this competence with the help of existing literature and standards. The results suggest that business skills include those related to planning, organizing, and leading nursing activities; furthermore, the ability to handle legal issues and resolve ethical dilemmas was introduced by the authors. A separate component is budgeting, which can be defined as financial skills. This article provides working definitions for business competencies, although the literature review by Gunawan and Aungsuroch (2017) is not systematic. Still, when applied to the CAUTI project, these findings can set a direction for the researcher’s self-improvement in terms of crucial skills.
White, Pillay, and Huang (2016) chose a more specific aspect of business activity that could benefit a nurse; their research was dedicated to innovation competence. It consisted of a survey that collected the participants’ perspectives on the importance of various innovation competencies; over 1,400 nurses were contacted. They were also asked to provide self-assessments of their innovation competencies. The findings demonstrated that the nurses were generally dissatisfied with their innovation competencies. However, the study stated the importance of multiple skills, including business-related ones, for example, resource management. The self-reporting methodology might not produce objective results, but from the perspective of the CAUTI project, this article highlights the significance of business skills and provides expert suggestions on the relative value of several of them, which can further direct one’s self-improvement in the area.
To summarize, the significance of business skills for nursing can be supported by recent peer-reviewed articles. The topic of financial skills should be paid particular attention to because a brief literature search demonstrates that they are not researched very extensively from the perspective of nursing leadership. For the CAUTI project, these skills are important since project management requires their application, and the presented literature can help to direct self-improvement efforts in this regard.
Meaningful Use of Informatics in Health Care: The Role of DNPs
Nursing informatics is a broad field, and one of the most recent trends in it is meaningful use (MU). As defined by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2010), as well as HealthIT (2013), this term refers to the use of health information technology in a way that corresponds to several criteria which are supposed to result in its improved, more meaningful application. For the first stage, the criteria include structured data capturing and coordination. The second and third stages incorporate these criteria as well, but they are also meant to reflect the increasing use of technology to improve the quality of care, especially its processes (the second stage) and outcomes (the third stage). Nurse leaders, including Doctors of Nursing Practice (DNPs), are important actors in the advancement of MU (McBride, Tietze, Hanley, & Thomas, 2017). Here, several sources will be summarized to provide the information that would be of interest to a DNP who contributes to an MU program.
First, sufficient evidence indicates that the choice of MU is beneficial for healthcare. Thus, a survey with 1177 Texas nurses demonstrated that MU maturity could be associated with nurses being more satisfied with their health technology (McBride et al., 2017). Furthermore, the more meaningful use of technology may be connected to an improvement in certain patient outcomes. For example, Wani and Malhotra (2018) found a decrease in readmission and length of stay in acute care as a result of MU.
Second, the implementation of MU programs is not simple. Slight et al. (2015) carried out 35 interviews and found that the key challenges of MU implementation, especially in rural settings, included training, the need for appropriate infrastructure, and patient engagement. Furthermore, a qualitative study by Green et al. (2015), which utilized interviews, demonstrated that the maintenance of MU is complex and requires ongoing monitoring and leadership. Other than that, resources and their management were a concern, including finances and human resources, especially technically competent individuals (Green et al., 2015; Slight et al., 2015). Therefore, business and financial skills would be important for an MU-promoting DNP nurse.
To summarize, MU is likely to become a helpful tool for a healthcare institution, but it is not easy to achieve. A DNP leader needs to take into account and plan for multiple challenges that might allow them to practice their leadership and management skills. The current CAUTI project does not focus on MU, but it is also a quality improvement effort, which means that the implementation challenges discussed above may be applicable to it.
References
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2010). Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Electronic Health Record Incentive Program. Web.
Green, L., Potworowski, G., Day, A., May-Gentile, R., Vibbert, D., Maki, B., & Kiesel, L. (2015). Sustaining “meaningful use” of health information technology in low-resource practices. The Annals of Family Medicine, 13(1), 17-22.
Gunawan, J., & Aungsuroch, Y. (2017). Managerial competence of first-line nurse managers: A concept analysis. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 23(1), e12502.
HealthIT. (2013). What is meaningful use? Web.
McBride, S., Tietze, M., Hanley, M., & Thomas, L. (2017). Statewide study to assess nursesʼ experiences with meaningful use–based electronic health records. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 35(1), 18-28.
Slight, S. P., Berner, E. S., Galanter, W., Huff, S., Lambert, B. L., Lannon, C.,… Payne, T. H. (2015). Meaningful use of electronic health records: Experiences from the field and future opportunities. JMIR Medical Informatics, 3(3), e30.
Wani, D., & Malhotra, M. (2018). Does the meaningful use of electronic health records improve patient outcomes? Journal of Operations Management, 60(1), 1-18.
White, K., Pillay, R., & Huang, X. (2016). Nurse leaders and the innovation competence gap. Nursing Outlook, 64(3), 255-261.