Appropriate leadership and education are the key to transforming healthcare and the patient experience

Abstract

The quality of nursing care is under the media spotlight once more and changes in nursing practice, management, culture and education are blamed. While the RCN can never condone poor practice, it is frustrating that little attention is paid to the many positive stories that we hear about all the time-the apparently small changes that transform the patient experience. Nurses are the health workers who deal most frequently with patients in all settings and our actions are directly related to better patient outcomes. Transformational leadership involves change, innovation, growth and empowerment of self and others. Change, of course, creates resistance. It threatens individual and institutional comfort zones. Thousands of nurses have benefited from the RCN Leadership Program, a portfolio of three distinct programs that help nurses and other members of the multidisciplinary team develop the skills and behaviors they need to make a differenced in their working environment and beyond. Each program approaches complex issues of leadership form a different direction, namely, practice, strategy and policy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)