Leadership Style: A Patient Outcome Make or Break of Care

Inquiry was cultivated by the immersion of Oncology patient care and dynamics within an externship and clinical experience. Observations were made regarding various team interactions, and leadership styles regarding the subsequential leadership care. It overall prompted the motivation to delve into further literature and research reviews. A PubMed systemic review journal “88% showed a positive or negative statistically significant correlation between leadership style and nurses’ job satisfaction to perform patient care. The transformational style had the greatest positive correlation in 9 out of 9 of cases” (Speechia, Cozzolino, Carini, et.al, 2021). The need for leadership transformation within the healthcare system has become a prevalent discussion within literature. Leadership plays a crucial role in overall patient outcomes in and out of the hospital system. Patient outcomes can influence the readmission rate, quality metrics of the hospital organization, as well as length of stay and reimbursement rates. In addition, outcomes can further be influenced as based upon the patient satisfaction survey results, relating to quality of care provided. The purpose of the integrative review is to further identify how leadership styles influence patient outcomes, patient experience, and nurse engagement regarding the overall hospital team framework. Furthermore, the integrative review will pay special attention to the oncology population. Question 1: How does nursing leadership styles and methods affect overall patient outcomes? Question 2: How does nursing leadership affect the care of oncology patients? The literature integrative review highlighted how each leadership style has an impact on how a patient improves or declines during hospitalization. There is an increase in patient satisfaction with transformational leadership. Furthermore, it was highlighted that nurses who adopted a new leadership style within their unit experienced increased quality improvement. When there is a lack of leadership, it increases the development of self-interests within nurses eliminating a team-based approach thus changing practices on a whole (Kok, et.al, 2022). Nurses are the driving force for transformational change and must be persistent. In addition to this, research highlighted how organization exhibit attitudes of above the need for change within leadership as an act of professionalism (Kok, et.all, 2022). Nurses who choose a rebel-like leadership behavior change are less invisible with actions thus increasing trust within the patient for improved outcomes. When relational leadership is used, there is decreased patient mortality and increased patient satisfaction. Overall, research showed that by adopting a transformational leadership approach it positively impacted the unit and decreased negativity regarding nurse dynamic, thus reducing patient morality and increasing job satisfaction between healthcare professionals (Wong, et.al, 2013). Regarding teamwork in nursing environments, there was found to be a decreased participation in change with collaboration thus negativity affecting patient care (Nene, 2024).