please respond to this post with a reference You have been selected to serve on a community outreach committee within your state’s nursing organization. The committee includes registered nurses of different specialties. At your first meeting, it becomes evident that not everyone is in agreement with a recent position statement about the role of spiritual care, with some members arguing they will no longer support the committee if the position statement is not revised or reversed. As a nurse leader and change agent, how would you approach the committee? How could you draw from change theory to address these concerns and encourage collaboration on the committee?
Disagreements about position statements will arise in the health care field, especially with the diversity of nursing roles and specialties. Nurse leaders as change agents can exhibit certain behaviors that encourage the acceptance of disagreements and influence positive attitudes. Approaching the committee with an unbiased opinion and accepting everyone’s opinion will help in identifying things that all members have in common to find a solution to the issue. Overcoming resistance can be addressed by having all members provide their vision for the future and what concerns they have regarding spiritual care. Using the three concepts of the change theory: driving forces, restraining forces, and equilibrium will help in identifying what is causing the differences in the change.
Petiprin (2020) describes that Kurt Lewin’s first stage of unfreezing includes finding methods for possibilities for people to let go of old patterns by increasing driving forces, decreasing restraining forces, and finally finding equilibrium. Reminding the committee members that quality patient outcomes by using spiritual care is the vision for the position statement. According to Weberg et al. (2019), using resistance as a support tool and not a barrier can help in understanding change theory because resistance shows a disruption to normal patterns but it is not always negative. Clinical nurse leaders should support resistance and face it to learn how to improve processes (Weberg et al., 2019). Encouraging collaboration on the committee can be done by using the restraining forces and comparing them to the driving forces to find equilibrium. This can be accomplished by open communication, discussing differences in perspectives, and finding the aspects that we all share in common.
References
Petiprin, A. (2020). Lewin’s change theory. Nursing-Theory.org. https://nursing-theory.org/theories-and-models/lewin-change-theory.php
Weberg, D., Mangold, K., Porter-O’Grady, T., & Malloch, K. (2019). Leadership in nursing practice: Changing the landscape of healthcare (3rd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning. https://bibliu.com/app/#/view/books/9781284146554/epub/EPUB/xhtml/12_Chapter01_06.html#page_62
