The Significance of Nursing Contributions to Clinical Governance

With the population growing and the health care system becoming increasingly intricate, robust systems, transparency, and accountability are crucial to positive patient care results. Clinical governance (CG) is a crucial component of today’s healthcare topography, making sure that healthcare organizations and professionals are responsible to their communities and patients (Oldland et al., 2020). The ever-rising public worry over safety and quality in healthcare services was the main motive to the development of CG. Among the professionals who are essential in this regard are the nurses. Forsdike et al. (2018) note that with their robust connections to patients and their families, nurses have an essential role to play in making sure good CG. The aim of this article is to discuss the significance of nursing contributions to CG.

CG is defined as a shared obligation to make sure that all patients get the best healthcare services (Oldland et al., 2020). Managers, midwives and nurses, therefore, have a shared/common goal of maximizing patient care. They share accountability for the care they deliver to their patients, ensure equitable use of resources, as well as establishing positive workplace cultures. According to Forsdike et al. (2018), nurses are placed ideally and skilled to maximize patients’ care while reducing risks to patients, and to work in systems and with patients, families, and carers to better patient safety as a component of their roles. Nurses play various roles with regard to care facilities’ governance, culture, and leadership. Nurses actively participate in the development of healthcare facilities’ organizational cultures to enable and prioritize care quality and patient safety (Oldland et al., 2020).  They communicate actively the profession’s dedication to the delivery of high-quality, safe healthcare. They also role play in ensuring CG by modelling professional conducts that are consistent with a dedication to quality and safety all the times (Forsdike et al., 2018), while at the same time embracing opportunities to further their knowledge and understanding of quality and safety systems and theories and taking part in clinical services’ management (Oldland et al., 2020). Nursing contributions are also crucial to CG since nurses mentor, encourage, and guide their colleagues in the delivery of high-quality, safe healthcare and participate in all facets of the development, deployment, assessment, and monitoring of CG processes.

Nursing contributions are also seen in bettering quality systems and patient safety. To realize this, nurses contribute to the designing of systems for the delivery of high-quality, safe medical care and providing clinical care within these systems’ parameters (Oldland et al., 2020). Nurses also communicate internally with clinicians along with other healthcare service establishments to support great care results and ensure modern knowledge and understanding regarding safe system designs (Forsdike et al., 2018). Nurses also maintain vigilance for openings and opportunities to better care systems by making sure that opportunities that they identify for improvement are reported and raised aptly. Senior nurses also role play in training their junior clinicians regarding the significance of working within the confines of organizational systems for clinical care delivery. The involvement of nurses in the designing and implementation of systems within health service organizations is also vital for incident management, open disclosure, risk management, quality measurement and improvement, and complaints and feedback. Nurses also play a role in the realization of CG by complying with professional codes of conduct and regulatory needs.

Concerning clinical effectiveness and performance, nurses maintain individual professional performance, competence, and skills and contribute to pertinent organizational procedures and policies (Oldland et al., 2020). Nurses also monitor their individual clinical performance, supervise and manage their juniors’ performance. This way, they are able to ensure that performance issues are appropriately reported and clinical teams work constructively (Forsdike et al., 2018). Nursing contributions to CG are also key since nurse contribute to the planning as well as development of undertakings associated with the healthcare service organization’s environment. Nurses also partner with consumers/patients since they understand their input to health care quality and safety and understand how healthcare literacy may influence the way a patient understands, gains access to, and utilizes healthcare information (Oldland et al., 2020). They also support patients to use and access high quality and easy to comprehend information regarding healthcare or illness, thus assisting them in decision making regarding the patients’ individual healthcare to the extent that they opt (Forsdike et al., 2018). Nurses also work alongside consumer representatives and families to make sure that healthcare systems are designed to support consumer participation in decision making.

To conclude, for CG to be fully effective, it is crucial that all stakeholders at all levels are engaged in its implementation. Nonetheless, nurses are particularly well placed in the health care network to promote patient care and safety, contribute to the advancement of internal systems, as well as enact and support governance guidelines.