The relationship between leadership and patient outcomes in Dental Hospitals

Author: Dr. Shoeb Ahmed Ilyas BDS, MPH, EMSRHS, M.Phil. (HHSM), MHRM, MS

(PSY), MS (BIOTECH), PGDMLE, FHTA.

Health Care Quality Management Consultant

Ruby Med Plus, Telangana State, India.

Leadership is defined as the process through which an individual attempts to intentionally

influence another individual or a group to accomplish goali. Building and sustaining oral health

services that reveal the aspirations of the communities they provide has proved a most important

confront all over the world. There is increasing demands on Dental professionals to identify and

measure their individual impact on the outcome of patients as cost-cutting strategies have raised

the thresholds for Dental hospitals to focus on patient satisfaction. This has increased the average

acuity of Dental hospital patients, along with the increase in demand for Dentist leadership and

patient outcomes. Dental Hospitals across the world have begun to see appropriate leadership of

Dental professionals as an intervention for improving communication; collaboration skills to

reduce Dental errors that direct to undesirable patient outcomes, hence Dental leaders are

conscientious for creating a vision of where the Dental Hospital should go by implementing

initiatives to achieve the vision of better patient outcomes. They create passion for goal

accomplishment and converse employees’ roles in contributing to the Dental Hospital strategy.

Leadership practices of Dentist can positively or negatively influence outcomes for patients.

Understanding the factors that contribute to leadership is fundamental to outcomes for patients.

Important domains of association between Dentist leadership and patient outcomes. These are

Dentist-patient relationships, Dentist-colleague relationships, Dentist-community relationships,

and Dentists’ relationships to self. Relationship-centered oral health care recognizes the

significance and exclusivity of each Dental staff relationship with every other, and considers

these interaction to be central in sustaining high-quality care, a high-quality work environment,

and better-quality organizational performance and improved patient outcomes.

Dentist leadership in the Genaral Dental practice setting is significant to ensure both best

possible patient outcomes and consecutive generations of motivated and passionate Dental staff,

but significant barriers to clinical leadership exist in Dental Hospital structures that preclude

health care managers from clinical decision making and better patient outcomes.

Dental Hospitals and other healthcare organizations have flattened their structures with wide

spans of control in an ongoing effort to reduce costs. When resources are limited, Dentist is

required to share their attention across their patients, with their clinical decision to prioritize

assessments and interventions. When understaffed units exist, Dentists are apparently required to

reduce or skip over certain tasks, thereby rising the risk of harmful patient outcomes. The

leadership relationship to patient outcomes in the work context has influence on Dentist

behavior, which facilitates patient care and improved outcomes, hence strong relationship

between Dentist leadership and patient outcomes exists in Dental hospitals, which has direct link

with reduced patient adverse events and complications.

Reports from the Institute of Medicine (IOM)ii have emphasized that leadership is indispensable

for achieving goals related to quality care and patient safety outcomes. Six categories of essential

leadership skills were acknowledged in the literature: (a) personal integrity, (b) strategic

vision/action orientation, (c) team building/communication, (d) management and technical

competence, (e) people skills, and (f) personal survival skills.

Relationship between Leadership styles and Patient Outcomes -

Effective Dentist leadership is essential to the creation of practice environments, with

appropriate staffing levels, that support dentist in preventing unnecessary Dental errors.

Common leadership styles have been labeled in the literature as transactional and

transformationaliii

. Transactional leadership centre on transactions or exchanges between leaders

and others, with self-interest as the key inducement for alliances. Conversely, transformational

leaders create a culture of leadership for all team members, nurturing empowerment, promoting

individualism, open communication and inclusive decision-makingiv

Key factors that have been

described in being effective in nurturing transformational clinical leaders are: provision and

access to effective role models, mechanisms for mentoring and clinical supervision, provision of

career pathways, intentional succession planning; organizations that value clinical competence

and promotion of centre of excellencev. Kerfoot and Wantz

vi recommend that healthcare settings

create cultures that offer experiences for risk taking, self-growth, and time to practice and obtain

feedback on all skills. By implementing a framework of goals to accomplish such as the

Leadership and patient outcomes.

Relationship between Emotional Intelligence of Health care manager’s leadership and

Patient outcomes -

Emotional intelligence may provide access to ones own resources, and is characterized by self-

awareness and the ability to motivate oneself to carry out tasks, be creative and perform wellvii

.

Leaders with a high level of EI drive emotions positively, bring out the best in all members of an

organization, and connect with others at an emotional level to make work more meaningful, as

well as infusing vitality and energy into the workplace.viii

Oral health care Leaders with a high

level of EI drive emotions positively, bring out the best in all members of an organization, and

connect with others at an emotional level to make work more meaningful, as well as infusing

vitality and energy into the workplace. Junior Dentist working with Dental leaders with high

Emotional Intelligence reported significantly less emotional exhaustion and psychosomatic

symptoms, better emotional health, greater collaboration and teamwork with Dental staff, and

more satisfaction with supervision and their jobs, as well as fewer unfulfilled patient care needs,

than Dentist working for dissonant leaders (i.e. pace-setting and commanding leadership styles)

Emotional Intelligence (EI) leadership skills are vital in order to create a supportive environment

and facilitate positive empowerment processes leading to subjective well-being of Oral health

care staff and good organizational climate. Nurse-Dentist collaboration in clinical care settings also

play significant role in drawing attention for exploring the experiences and contact of nurses and

Dentist collaborative functioning as co-leaders of clinical areas will enhance patient outcomes.Dental

Hospitals should focus on factors that enhance their ability to model nurse-Dentist collaboration for

effective leadership and conceptualise healthy work environments that help patients, families, and the

entire members of the health care team and also identify barriers for gaining effective collaborative

leadership in delivering effective patient outcomes, so that individual, institutional, and societal

strategies can be implemented to a health care environment for better outcomes of Dental treatment

to patients and better satisfaction and meeting expectations of families and all caregivers.

i Shortell S.M. & Kaluzny A.D. (2000). Health Care Management: Organization Design and

Behavior, 4th edn. Delmar Publishers, Albany, New York.

ii Institute of Medicine. Crossing the quality chasm: a new health system for the 21st century.

Washington (DC): National Academy Press; 2001.

iii

Thyer G.L. (2003) Dare to be different: transformational leadership may hold the key to

reducing the nursing shortage. Journal of Nursing Management 11 (2), 73–79.

iv

McCormack B., Kitson A., Harvey G., Rycroft-Malone J., Tichen A. & Seers K. (2002)

Getting evidence into practice: the meaning of context. Journal of Advanced Nursing 38, 94–

104.

v Borbasi S. & Gaston C. (2002) Nursing and the 21st century: what’s happened to leadership?

Collegian 9 (1), 31–35.

vi

Kerfoot K, Wantz SL. Compliance leadership: the 17th century model that doesn't work.

Dermatol Nurs. 2003;15(4): 377-378, 381. vii

Akerjordet K. & Severinsson E. (2007a) Emotional intelligence: a review of the literature with

specific focus on empirical and epistemological perspectives. Journal of Clinical Nursing 16

(8), 1405–1413.

viii

George J.M. (2000) Emotions and leadership: the role of emotional intelligence. Human

relations 53 (8), 1027–1055.