The Perception of Nursing Leaders towards Communication and Relationship Management Competencies while using Digital Platforms during COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar

Purpose: To evaluate nursing leaders' perception towards communication and relationship management competencies while using digital platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. Background: Communication and relationship management competencies among nursing leaders will ensure healthcare models are successfully implemented. Nursing leaders can achieve effective leadership by mastering these competencies leading to an overall improvement in the quality of nursing care. However, digital platforms have been rapidly evolving in the healthcare ecosystem and have been significant during the battle with COVID-19. It is crucial to ensure that nursing leaders can use digital platforms to communicate and practice efficient management in their op-erations, especially during a crisis when their services are vital. Design: Descriptive, comparative study. Methods: The study was conducted between February to March 2021. A 5-item Linkert-type questionnaire was adopted from the American Organization for Nursing Executives (2005) and was sent to identified nursing leaders in Hamad Medical Corporation through the official email. Results: Two hundred fifty nurse leaders were invited to participate, but only 116 responded positively, translating to a response rate of 46.4%. The male participants represented a larger proportion of 64.10%, while the female was 35.90%. Regarding the questionnaire, the Cronbach alpha was α ˃ 0.987, indicating that all items revealed a sufficient level of internal consistency. The respondents had a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 52.6n in the communication and relationship management items. Influencing behavior, relationship management, and effective communica-tion had the lowest scores, which indicate low competency. The F value in ANOVA analysis was close to 1.0, implying that the null hypothesis is true. The significance value is <0.5 implying that there is a difference in response on effective communication proficiency of nurse leaders. Conclusions: Digital platforms are communication tools that are widely adopted to engage and reach nurses on numerous topics. Nurse leaders should capitalize on their benefits and generate critical discussions. The continued need to research nursing leadership competencies is critical as healthcare continues to change and evolve. Educational institutions and healthcare organizations must understand that nursing leaders should strive for professional development and knowledge acquisition to improve their communication and management.

Challenges to Effective Nursing Leadership: a Systematic Review

Background: Nurses have been at the center of major improvements in the health. However these feet could not have been achieved without effective leadership. Leadership is required on every sector such education, military and health. Effective leadership tends to blend the thoughts reflection and images as well as influencing followership to achieve a desired goal. Nursing leadership has however been confronted with major challenges despite the major achievements by the health workforce. Hence this review was to describe the findings of a systematic review of studies that examine the challenges of nursing leadership and to make recommendations for further study.Methods: The search strategy of this systematic review included six (6) electronic databases. Published studies that focused on the challenges of nursing leadership were included. Data extractions and analysis were completed on all included studies by the researcher.Results: About 29,851 articles and abstracts were screen resulting in 8 included studies. Using content analysis the challenges faced by the nursing leaders as identified in the studies were group into six (6),namely workload, Human resource recruitment and staffing, budget, Change management and team diversity, Unclear job description and patient safety and expectations. The analysis shows that the main challenge facing nursing leaders were workload, Human resource recruitment and staffing as indicated by six(6) studies with the patient safety and expectation being the least as cited by two(6) studies.Conclusion: This review concludes that nursing leadership should be looked at critically at all levels of health while giving enough support to the nurse leaders in the discharge of their duties.