Question

Compare the management skills of clinical leaders and nursing management leaders. Should differences in scope, as well as in the qualities of the leaders, be identified, or should differences be noted only in the scope of leadership?

Answer 1

Although as a common perception both the terms are synonyms and are used interchangeably but in essence there is a big difference between these two terms.

Nursing leader
A nurse leader is the one who possesses excellent and effective communication and inter personnel skills.

He / she is a risk taker and goes extra miles to achieve the desired result, he / she does not compromise on less than the destiny.

-A leader is energetic and sincere enough in that he devotes his entire life in order to achieve the goals. A leader is taken as the role model by the followers therefore at times a leader has got excessive responsibility on his shoulders even pertinent to his action in his personal life

Clinical leader

In many areas of the developed world, contemporary hospital care is confronted by workforce challenges, changing consumer expectations and demands, fiscal constraints, increasing demands for access to care, a mandate to improve patient centered care, and issues concerned with levels of quality and safety of health care. Effective governance is crucial to efforts to maximize effective management of care in the hospital setting. Emerging from this complex literature is the role of leadership in the clinical setting.

The importance of effective clinical leadership in ensuring a high quality health care system that consistently provides safe and efficient care has been reiterated in the scholarly literature and in various government reports. Recent inquiries, commissions, and reports have promoted clinician engagement and clinical leadership as critical to achieving and sustaining improvements to care quality and patient safety.

Clinical leaders skills:

• Influence staff and set positive examples
• Delegate tasks and coordinate teams
• Commit to the organization and embody their values
• Setting policy
• Overseeing quality measures
• Spearheading transformation
• Fiscal responsibilities
• Ensuring regulatory compliance

Differences in both is only scope of leadership

Nurse leader has only limited scope of service as of nursing as on other hand clinical leader has all the hospital responsibilities.

but responsibilities from both the leadership can be shared mutually