Reflection
The purpose of this reflection is to reflect on the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), with attention to its essentials including system levels within the healthcare organisation, relationship-based care framework, policy and politics, leadership, marketing and business planning, informatics, and communication among others.
On the overall, the DNP is of immense assistance and importance to learners. It is through the program that one learns about the system levels including the micro-system, meso-system, and macro-system levels within a healthcare organisation (Hande, Beuscher, Allison & Phillipi, 2017). A nurse leader meets the needs of a group of patients, guide the patient to their recovery, and aligns patient needs with those of the organisations respectively in these system levels (Anderson, Khatri & Blankson, 2015). In the healthcare sector, a consideration of the relationship with self, colleagues, and patients or their families is often critical for a positive outcome. While at it, DNP prepares nurse leaders to internalise both the strategic and political strategies of their organisation as these directly affects the working of the caregivers and patient outcomes. Concerning policy, the formulation stage is the most crucial for a DNP-prepared leader to influence change since it is the initial stage that determines the eventual success of the policy (Wong, Cummings & Ducharme, 2013).
I am a transformational leader. Transformational leadership theory focuses on harnessing the leadership skills, and matching them with organisational dynamics and change management to effectively implement organisational changes (Starr & Nesse, 2016). Such strategies include, but are not limited to, finding better ways to resolve financial challenge and adequate staffing, for example, through training of the existing and motivating the existing staff to do more than they should, conducting a strength, weakness, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis of a hospital before conducting the change (Uhrenfeldt, Lakanmaa, Flinkman, Basto & Attree, 2014), and determination of the data required to support the change. Through knowledge acquired from DNP, I can determine that inadequate staffing in my practice setting needs to be changed. Given the financial strain, instead of recruiting, I would motivate the existing staff beyond their normal or usual abilities.
Conclusively, I have learnt the pertinence of DNP to a prospective nurses or nurse leaders. The individual essentials of DNP touch on every aspect of nursing, thus leads to a holistic and transformational nurse leader.