Aim: The aim of this task is to demonstrate an understanding of the impact of leadership on patient safety and quality care in a healthcare work unit. I am required to assess a scenario relevant to my work context (social work – below) and identify potential symptoms of a compromised organisational governance and/or disengaged leadership practices. This assignment will help develop critical evaluation skills and form arguments based on contemporary evidence, which are essential skills for practice improvement in the health care setting. Critically appraise leadership, change management and organisational theories and principles and determine the applicability to my practice. Task Description: You will choose a scenario relevant to your discipline context and examine the scenario for potential issues that could be linked to leadership practices or organisational governance issues (i.e. escalation, policy/procedure issues, risk management). For this task you are required to write an essay. Please: Choose a scenario most relevant to your context or specialty stream. Concisely describe the context and situation including the most important factors that are impacting on the workplace and delivery of safe, quality care or professional practice. Factors discussed are prioritised. Critically evaluate the issues identified that may impact on consumers, patients or other stakeholders in this setting supported by relevant literature. Prioritise and make recommendations specific to your scenario setting including strategies that can be implemented to support quality care or professional practice. Mental Health Scenario You are working in a mental health service that according to Standard 2 of the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards is meant to involve consumers and carers in the organisational and strategic processes that guide the planning, design and evaluation of service delivery. Over the past year you have noticed that consumer and carer representatives are rarely in attendance at key organisational governance committees for areas such as patient safety, facility design, quality improvement, patient or family education, ethics and research. When consumers and carers do attend meetings their involvement appears tokenistic and many are unclear about what their role is. Consumer and carer representatives are often not provided with enough background information for agenda items and staff use acronyms and jargon, which makes it very hard for the consumers and carers to follow the conversation. Staff are not clear about why consumers and carers are participating in meetings and some staff feel that consumers should not be included as staff are the experts in service delivery. Social Work Scenario You know of/or are working in the children under orders team at a local Child Safety Service Centre. The staff in the team describe themselves as being very strengths based and client focussed in their work. These staff pride themselves on prioritising the families on their caseload ahead of all other demands on their time, and this sometimes means that they fall behind in terms of updating client records. Child Safety Officers in the team have been heard to say that they studied social work because they are “people people”, and that they would have studied accounting if they wanted to sit in front of a computer all day. On a number of occasions now, problems have arisen because of incomplete record keeping. Most recently an application for a child protection order was rejected by the Childrens Court because of incomplete information resulting from poor record keeping. As a result a child was returned to a living arrangement that staff felt was potentially unsafe. Provide a clear introduction and conclusion to your paper. You may use headings to organise your work if you wish. Write in the third person. Use academic language[1] throughout. Refer to the marking guidelines when writing your assignment. This will assist you in calculating the weightings of the sections for your assignment. State your word count (excluding your reference list) on the Assignment title page. Word limits for assessment items need to be strictly adhered to. The word limit for an assessment item includes in text citations, tables and quotations. The word limit is 1500 and DOES NOT include the reference list. Please note the marker will cease marking your submitted work once they have reached the allocated word limit. This paper should be supported by no fewer than eight different sources from the scholarly literature[2] (digitised readings, research articles, relevant Government reports and text books) that has been published within the last five years. References must conform to APA 6th edition style and be presented on a separate page. Everyday language is predominantly subjective. It is mainly used to express opinions based on personal preference or belief rather than evidence. Written academic English is formal. It avoids colloquialisms and slang, which may be subject to local and social variations. Formal language is more precise and stable, and therefore more suitable for the expression of complex ideas and the development of reasoned argumentation. [2] Scholarly or peer-reviewed journal articles are written by scholars or professionals who are experts in their fields, as opposed to literature such as magazine articles, which reflect the tastes of the general public and are often meant as entertainment.
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