Effective and Ethical Decision-Making in Healthcare Leadership- Prioritizing Patients, Employees, and Stakeholders

Any healthcare organization’s success depends on its ability to optimize care provision processes towards safe and effective care. This, however, is dependent on the individual input of members of these healthcare organizations. Overall success is only attainable when each component of these systems is effective in their clinical decision-making processes. This also requires a collaboration between the healthcare provider leaders and their subjects in key healthcare operationalizations that contribute to caring optimization. Care leaders are often tasked with identifying and understanding the routine difficulties that present within the healthcare systems and directing their subjects towards the resolution of these difficulties. In this regard, they should always exhibit marked situational awareness and huge problem troubleshooting capabilities for them to attain excellence by exploring the aspects that help these leaders make effective and ethical decisions.

These aspects include sound decision-making, which maintains key significance in the optimization of healthcare. Healthcare outcomes are often probabilistic, with a majority of the clinical decisions made with varying degrees of uncertainty (Nibbelink & Brewer, 2018). This underpins the need for sound and informed decision-making in clinical settings, as the outcomes are dependent on these decisions. Whereas evidence-based guidelines and technological tools that aid in clinical decision-making have been developed, clinicians’ decisions toward care plans still maintain the central role. 

Sound decision-making ensures better clinical outcomes. Sound decision-making entails the utilization of evidence-based knowledge in the selection of patient care plans that produce better outcomes. Sound decision-making not only involves the caregivers but also draws input from the individual patients as well as their families (Nibbelink & Brewer, 2018). Sound decision-making also involves the ability to include other healthcare providers within the healthcare team in the establishment of an effective care plan. Furthermore, it also enables the sharing of health knowledge as well as the flow of health information from the patients to all the providers required to optimize the care process. Additionally, the patient is empowered to inform clinical decisions that they feel are right for them. The overall benefit of a proper decision-making process is evident in better patient outcomes as well as the overall satisfaction of the healthcare team.

Poor clinical decisions may sometimes be detrimental to the patients as well as the caregivers. Poor or uninformed clinical decision-making has been implicated in poor clinical outcomes, as evident in mortality related to healthcare provision processes or procedures. Increased morbidity has also been implicated. This may be attributable to wrong treatment procedures, improper therapeutic approaches, adverse drug reactions resulting from provider-associated errors, and poor disease prognosis associated with improper care plans, among others. The patient often feels the overall effects, whose incarcerations are attributable to factors other than themselves and their families and communities that have to share the health financial burden resulting from longer hospital stays.

All clinical decisions should be evidence-based. Evidence-based decision-making entails the utilization of current research or experimental evidence and an approved knowledge base in establishing frameworks utilizable in informing a practice or a policy-making process (Porzsolt, 2016). Evidence-based decision-making requires that the person involved in the decision-making role screens for the most current knowledge base that is specific to the field and then integrates this knowledge with their intrinsic expertise to give a specific direction. Evidence-based decision-making eliminates an element of chance by ensuring that decisions made are compatible or in concert with previously documented findings on the applicability of a given intervention.

 Evidence-based clinical or medical decision-making utilizes this experimental evidence or research work to inform a patient’s care plan. Healthcare is a critical field that involves human lives. It is, therefore, necessary that healthcare providers make decisions that ensure the safety of these patients and not those that may bring harm to the patients. Evidence-based knowledge reduces the probabilistic nature of healthcare interventions by ensuring that clinical decisions are selected from a wider array that will resolve the presenting patient problem while maintaining the overall safety of the patients. Evidence-based decision-making also eliminates the trial and error of clinical interventions that may, in turn, prolong hospital stays and thereby produce a heavier financial burden to the patients and their famili