Nursing Leadership and Patient Safety

This chapter discusses the important connection of nursing leadership and patient safety. Nursing leadership is well positioned in healthcare organizations to drive excellence in nursing practice, promote positive culture, and focus on delivering safe patient care. This chapter identifies leadership practices that are practical, evidence based, and focused on both patients and nurses. The nurse leader today must remain informed of the many practices available and how individual nursing leader influence is key, in helping to support nurses while keeping patients safe. At the end of this chapter, the practices of utilizing and tracking data to impact nursing sensitive quality indicators, use of suits to scrubs, standardizing nurse leader rounds, and implementation of Code Lavender provide nurse leaders with practical tools to utilize every day to make a difference.