NHS FPX 5004 Assessment 3 Leadership and Group Collaboration

Leadership and Group Collaboration

Student Name

Capella University

NHS FPX 5004

Prof. Name

Submission Date

Leadership and Group Collaboration

Date:_________

Student Name:__________-

Clinic Name:___________

Lakeland Medical Clinic 

Dear __________, 

Compassion, proactivity, and collaboration with others (including cultural competence and trust in the community) are essential skills for successful leadership in today’s health care environment. For the diversity program of Lakeland Clinic, they are looking for the following leadership traits: cultural humility, active listening, emotional intelligence, and encouraging an inclusive dialogue. All of these qualities assist a leader in recognising the systemic failures in care delivery and motivate staff to reflect on their beliefs and prejudices. First, an effective leader in this arena should be flexible, adaptable to the input or feedback from the community, and should want to continue to learn throughout his/her leadership about the expectations (cultural norms) of the communities served, especially the Haitian population in our community. 

Moreover, such a leader should have transformational qualities – to communicate a common outlook on how to treat their staff fairly & with compassion, and to set a shining example for how they treat others with respect and inclusiveness. Bhardwaj says that the transformational leader in the healthcare sector is particularly successful because they bring the values of the team to match the mission of the organization and thus other team members catch on to the changes they have introduced in the organization. A leader can create an environment where his/her employees and patients feel appreciated, respected, and enjoy the light of love by establishing team psychological safety and promoting open and honest discussions about diversity. This is essential to the morale of the staff, and to rebuilding trust in the community and improving health. 

If I had to name a health care leader among whom to pick the model and lead in this effort, then I would name my favorite pediatrician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who spoke out about the Flint water crisis. Dr. Hanna-Attisha was a constant advocate for marginalized communities, leveraged data to build relationships with the system to bring about change, and made her work culturally responsive and community-oriented.

Her leadership was humanistic and evidence-based – it brought together the knowledge gained from the evidence and the grassroots. Like her, I appreciate the community’s voice (data) as a more effective way to identify a problem, and more especially to create solutions with the majority affected. 

Today, I realized that there is a very strong trait that I share with Dr. Hanna-Attisha: empathic communication. In a previous quality improvement initiative at our institution, I facilitated focus groups of a group of NES patients to gain an understanding of patient perceptions of barriers to care. Likewise, working with the interpreters and community health workers was important to me to ensure that stories of the patients were directly included in the design of the intervention, just like Dr. Hanna-Attisha did with the community health workers and interpreters to confirm that Flint residents were concerned about this issue.

I would play the character of embodying a powerful vision – For every Haitian patient that enters a clinic door, he/she will feel understood, respected, and welcomed; and I will play my part as part of a team to make that vision possible. The strategies that I use to monitor cultural competence would include the following: routine check-ins, reflective practice, shared discussion/rewards of cultural competence milestones, and rewards for the efforts to support cultural competence.

In addition, I would model my style after one of the principles of servant leadership as I would have a focus on the needs of the team and society. The focus of this implies proactively removing barriers to work teams functioning effectively (e.g., lack of training) and equipping staff to assist them in identifying ways they can function effectively to develop cultural humility.

Different kinds of trust can only be formed by servant leaders – that is, by leading second and first listening. In this project, this would mean having listening sessions with the leaders of the Haitian communities before recommending any solutions so the solutions wouldn’t be imposed on the communities by the institutions, but they would be given by the communities. 

I would also set up guidelines and inclusive decision-making in our interdisciplinary group of clinicians, interpreters, HR reps, Community Liaisons, and administrators to facilitate proper communication and interaction. File sharing, as well as meetings and updates, would be carried out on a shared digital platform like Microsoft Teams or Slack, while meeting documentation would be captured.

The sharing of information, updates, and meetings would be asynchronously conducted on a shared digital platform (e.g., Microsoft Teams or Slack), and meeting documentation would be captured. There would be regular (virtual and face-to-face) inter-working sessions that will follow a team agenda that the team members will develop together, and where facilitation would alternate so that there is community collaboration. 

This would be made possible through a clear assignment of responsibility by setting up clear roles following RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, and then by regularly monitoring progress bi-weekly according to SMART goals. To encourage the free flow of ideas, I would use techniques such as the nominal group process and + DELTA feedback so that they all got a chance to be heard – even the quieter or lower-ranking employees. Additionally, the cultural competency training would be included in the team norms – starting on the first day – using standards such as the National CLAS Standards that focus on the importance of equitable and culturally competent care. These practices will help us create a collaborative ecosystem, drawing on the culture of inclusivity we want to foster in the clinic as a whole by embedding them as a part of our working practice. 

Sincerely, 

Assessment 3 is about leadership and group collaboration in healthcare. We write a professional letter addressing real challenges. To get the next (4th) assessment of this class, visit: NHS FPX 5004 Assessment 4