The Role of Ethics within Leadership
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The Role of Ethics within Leadership
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Currently, healthcare institutions are facing remarkable changes aimed at improving service provision, productivity and patient satisfaction (Barkhordari-Sharifabad, Ashktorab & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, 2017). Similar to these changes, nurse leaders face health concerns related to patient awareness, nursing skills and low quality of life. Nonetheless, nurse leaders are expected to ensure patients are not just cared for ethically but rather use ethics as the basis of their professional practice. Healthcare leaders have an obligation to protect, respect and defend the basic rights of patients and caregivers (Mannix, Wilkes & Daly, 2015). In nursing practice, leadership plays an important role in motivating and enabling nurses to deliver quality care (Barkhordari-Sharifabad, Ashktorab & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, 2017). Moreover, leadership requires ethics to create an ethical workplace to meet patient outcomes and job satisfaction.
The Role of Ethics within Leadership
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The Role of Ethics within Leadership
A previous study demonstrates that ethics involves doing the right or wrong; however, assenting to the right action could be challenging (Barkhordari-Sharifabad, Ashktorab & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, 2017). In healthcare settings, recognising ethics helps leaders guide nursing staff to provide skilled professional care. Nurses in leadership positions must promote ethics by implementing ethical leadership, which involves developing appropriate behaviours through individual actions and interpersonal communication, which leads to improved decision-making (Barkhordari-Sharifabad, Ashktorab & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, 2017). Ethics also help leaders to reduce work leaves and increase nursing staff job satisfaction through decreased moral distress while creating an ethical workplace (Mannix, Wilkes & Daly, 2015). According to Flite and Harman (2013), ethical principles are the bias of contemporary nursing. Effective nurse leaders exhibit clinical competence in line with the moral principles of professional practice. Some of these principles include; nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice, autonomy. Therefore, the purpose of this essay is to discuss the role of ethics within leadership. Primarily, the paper will discuss the nonmaleficence and beneficence to leadership, the application of ethical principles to leadership issues, and the application of Ethical principles to my leadership. In the end, the essay will provide a conclusion highlighting the assignment’s key issues.
Explanation and Application of Ethical Principles to Leadership
Nonmaleficence
The non-maleficence principle does not support the notion of harming others, an aspect that ensures necessary measures are implemented to reduce violence and conflict (Doucette, 2013). This ethical principle is essential for healthcare leaders because it presents them with an opportunity to ensure that their behaviour does not inflict harm to patients. Generally, health care leaders can be the non-maleficence principle to act ethically. Decision-making is a complex process and affects different relationships in a healthcare setting. Using ethics as a platform for decision-making can help healthcare leadership to promote the relationship between providers, patients and payers.
Beneficence
The beneficence principle involves creating a workplace environment where all staff deliver safe, quality care and address conflicts constructively (Doucette, 2013). Furthermore, this principle highlights the provision of benefits. In this regard, providers assess risks and benefits and make beneficial patient decisions. In relation to leadership, beneficence can be applied to help leaders develop and maintain skills to consider individual patient needs. Beneficence can act as the foundation to help leaders make decisions using the available best-evidence-based practice (Bruning & Baghurst, 2013). The principle motivates leaders to act and improve healthcare decisions between primary shareholders.
Application of Ethical Principles to Leadership Issues
Research shows that the main issue of healthcare leaders is the tenuous relationship between primary stakeholders such as payers, patients and providers (Bruning & Baghurst, 2013). Low trust between the primary stakeholders contributes to communication breakdown. However, healthcare leaders should understand patient-physician relationships, payer-patient relationships, and payer-provider relationships. As such, beneficence and non-maleficence principles can help leaders address these issues. Primarily, in issues related to payer-provider relationships, healthcare leaders support both parties in a bid to reduce medical expenses while efficiently using the available resources. The provider’s decision can determine the quality, quantity and healthcare cost (Bruning and Baghurst (2013).
However, in this case, physicians’ decisions are determined by market trends. In the payer-provider relationship, leadership challenges arise from lowering the variation in payment and payer. Moreover, leadership issues arise in this relationship when healthcare leaders help to recognize evidence-based practices that significantly reduce reimbursement and medical expenses. Healthcare reimbursements and economics do not offer an ethical market because even moral physicians may fail to correctly guide patients, especially in a fee-for-service payment system (Bruning and Baghurst (2013). Therefore, healthcare leaders can use non-maleficence and beneficence principles to improve the healthcare system.
Essentially, the beneficence principles can allow healthcare leaders to focus on all the issues in the payer-provider relationship to ensure that processes and procedures are in place to benefit providers, patients, healthcare institutions and the larger community. On the other hand, healthcare leadership can use the non-maleficence principle to guide parties involved in the payer-provider relationship to make the right economic decisions. Bruning and Baghurst (2013) state that poor economic choices can contribute to the loss of the healthcare institution, adversely affecting providers, patients or society. Another issue is the patient-physician relationship. Patients can distrust the providers when there is pressure on the patient-physician relationship.
Physicians provide patient-centred care that allows shared decision-making. Hence, patients should trust providers to deliver quality services without influencing the economic benefits of the physicians. Leadership issues arise in the relationship between the patient and provider when there is no trust. To address trust issues, in this case, healthcare leaders can use non-maleficence and beneficence principles to make ethical decisions to improve trust. For instance, the healthcare leadership can use the beneficence principle to make decisions that advance all the involved stakeholders’ decisions to promote public health. Conversely, the leader can use the non-maleficence principle to ensure that the patients and providers are not affected by the decision whilst promoting the image of the healthcare institution.
Application of Ethical Principles to Own Leadership
Leadership is an important aspect of advanced practice nurses (APNs) (Lamb, Martin‐Misener, Bryant‐Lukosius & Latimer, 2018). Furthermore, APNs are required to demonstrate leadership skills. Therefore, as a frontline healthcare provider, I will use the principle of beneficence to provide the best evidence-based care to my patients. Evidence also shows that APNs are nurses that have completed graduate education, and have skills and knowledge (Martin-Misener, Harbman, Donald, Reid, Kilpatrick, Carter & DiCenso, 2015). Additionally, APNs are competent in leadership research, collaboration, consultation and clinical care.
Therefore, I will use the non-maleficence principle to improve my leadership research to get the best and current evidence-based interventions to provide quality and safe care while reducing harm to my patients. Preventing harm is important when dictating our contribution to population health. By and large, I will use the principles of non-maleficence and beneficence to improve my clinical and professional leadership. Clinical leadership will emphasize my current nursing practice in the healthcare setting. Conversely, professional leadership activities will allow me to develop my nursing practice nationally or globally.
Conclusion
From the discussion, it is evident that ethical principles are the foundation of healthcare leadership. Ethics also help leaders create ethical workplaces that improve patient outcomes and job satisfaction. Again, the principles of non-maleficence and beneficence are essential because they help leaders to make ethical decisions whilst promoting relationships between primary stakeholders. The discussion also shows that healthcare leaders can use beneficence and non-maleficence principles to improve trust issues between providers and patients. Similarly, leaders can use these principles to solve payer-provider challenges by ensuring that processes in place benefits providers as well as patients. Regarding my leadership qualities, I will use beneficence and non-maleficence principles to provide best-evidence care to patients and improve my professional capabilities for future practice settings.
References
Barkhordari-Sharifabad, M., Ashktorab, T., & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, F. (2017). Obstacles and problems of ethical leadership from the perspective of nursing leaders: A qualitative content analysis. Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, 10, 1. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5432950/
Bruning, P., & Baghurst, T. (2013). Improving ethical decision making in health care leadership. Bus Eco J, 4, e101. doi:10.4172/2151-6219.1000e101
Doucette, J. N. (2013). Decision making through the ethics lens. Nursing Management, 44(9), 46-50. doi: 10.1097/01.NUMA.0000433378.34519.95
Flite, C. A., & Harman, L. B. (2013). Code of ethics: Principles for ethical leadership. Perspectives in Health Information Management/AHIMA, American Health Information Management Association, 10(Winter). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3544144/
Lamb, A., Martin‐Misener, R., Bryant‐Lukosius, D., & Latimer, M. (2018). Describing the leadership capabilities of advanced practice nurses using a qualitative descriptive study. Nursing Open. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.150
Mannix, J., Wilkes, L., & Daly, J. (2015). ‘Good ethics and moral standing’: a qualitative study of aesthetic leadership in clinical nursing practice. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 24(11 12), 1603-1610. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.12761
Martin-Misener, R., Harbman, P., Donald, F., Reid, K., Kilpatrick, K., Carter, N., … & DiCenso, A. (2015). Cost-effectiveness of nurse practitioners in primary and specialised ambulatory care: Systematic review. BMJ Open, 5(6), e007167. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2014-007167
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