VI: Effective Leadership

Virtual Issue: Fostering effective leadership in nursing and health care: an essential factor in patient safety and workforce sustainability
Debra Jackson, Editor, Journal of Clinical Nursing
[email protected]
July 2013

Leadership is again under the spotlight in the UK in the wake of the Francis Report, a compelling and voluminous report of the public enquiry into the standards of care at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (UK) (Francis 2013). While this is essentially a local report reflecting the situation in a particular region in the UK, it raises a range of critical and very contemporaneous issues that have ramifications extending well beyond the Mid Staffordshire environs. Like other international reports into poor care and poor patient outcomes, ineffectual leadership has been positioned as a key weakness that contributed in no small measure to the difficulties and problems at Mid Staffordshire.

As a topic for interrogation, discussion and debate, leadership has captured the attention of contributors to the Journal of Clinical Nursing, and in this special virtual issue, we present a number of our recently published papers in the area. The Editorial Team at the Journal of Clinical Nursing has an on-going commitment to publishing papers that interrogate and critically examine health care leadership and related issues. Indeed, reflecting on this collection of papers, it is clear that leadership is an area that we need to continue to focus on. Despite the work to date, there remains considerable work to be done in understanding the ways that positive and enabling leadership behaviours and traits can be effectively enacted in the health care environment, to the betterment of outcomes for patients, families and staff. We welcome future papers that will contribute to the developing evidence-base and further the discourses on health care leadership.

References FRANCIS, R. 2013. Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundations Trust Public Inquiry, The Stationary Office, England.

Editorial: Your leadership style – how are you working to achieve a preferred future?
Greta Cummings

Barriers to clinical leadership development: findings from a national survey
Gerard M Fealy, Martin S McNamara, Mary Casey et al.

The effects of leadership and ward factors on job satisfaction in nursing homes: a multilevel approach
Anders K Havig, Anders Skogstad et al.

Editorial: Lead us not
Debra Jackson and Roger Watson

Between being and doing – the nature of leadership of first-line nurse managers and registered nurses
Gunilla Johansson, Lars Andersson, Barbro Gustafsson and Christer Sandahl

Leadership as part of the nurse consultant role: banging the drum for patient care
Jean McIntosh and Debbie Tolson

Guest editorial: Lead us not again: clinical leadership and the disciplinary contribution
Martin S McNamara and Gerard M Fealy

Boundary matters: clinical leadership and the distinctive disciplinary contribution of nursing to multidisciplinary care
Martin S McNamara, Gerard M Fealy et al.

Enhancing frontline clinical leadership in an acute hospital trust
Natasha Phillips and Geraldine Byrne

Leadership as part of the Nurse Consultant role: banging the drum for patient care
Jean McIntosh and Debbie Tolson

Nurses’ perceptions of leadership style in hospitals: a grounded theory study
Shu-Fen Su, Mary Jenkins and Po-Erh Liu