Week 6: Discussion Question – Leadership Diversity Discussion Prompt How does lack of diversity among leaders in healthcare organizations affect patient care? Discuss at least two examples of how you, as a nurse leader, would encourage a diverse and inclusive culture with your leadership team.

Expert Answer and Explanation

Leadership Diversity

The quality of patient care is dependent on several factors including the need for better and critical decision making among the leadership of the facility. In this regard, leadership diversity plays one of the most important roles in the proper functioning of an organization, the absence of diverse leadership can have numerous consequences on the overall patient care. Lack of diverse leadership leads to possible bias in decision making as there lacks of multiple points of view regarding a subject matter (Bowles et al., 2018).

Diversity also helps different interdisciplinary professionals to provide specialized input on how certain aspects can be incorporated into the company policy or within the daily activities of the staff. In the long run, the inconsistencies in leadership and performance can lead to poor patient outcomes and a lack of coordination. While there is a need for doctors to be included in the leadership, nurses can also play a role in creating a diverse leadership team with each providing different expertise.

A nurse leader can encourage a diverse and inclusive culture within the leadership team in various ways. To begin with, a culture of inclusivity can be encouraged through the creation of policies that require the leadership teams to be comprised of multiple interdisciplinary professionals. Additionally, a nurse can also make use of advocacy to help lobby for support in interdisciplinary leadership where different professionals are included within the leadership team (Marcelin et al., 2019).

These two methods can be used together to improve the chances of creating a diverse leadership team within the healthcare setting. Modern healthcare facilities are constantly changing and new roles and scopes of practice are being developed. In this regard, having a representation of each team or department in the leadership team can help in advocacy for the needs of the team and how they can best implement quality patient care.

References

Bowles, J. R., Adams, J. M., Batcheller, J., Zimmermann, D., & Pappas, S. (2018). The role of the nurse leader in advancing the Quadruple Aim. Nurse Leader, 16(4), 244-248.

Marcelin, J. R., Siraj, D. S., Victor, R., Kotadia, S., & Maldonado, Y. A. (2019). The impact of unconscious bias in healthcare: how to recognize and mitigate it. The Journal of infectious diseases, 220(Supplement_2), S62-S73.