Personal Changes
A major change among RNs that challenged them and was difficult for them to make focused on implementing a transcultural care model among the nurses that required the nurses to become more educated about different cultures and how to respond to patients of these various cultures. It required of the nurses the need to maintain two different perspectives and sets of beliefs in the minds at once—their own beliefs and an empathetic view of the beliefs of the patient of the different cultural background. As Kodama and Fukahori (2017) noted, the main challenge for RNs tasked with a change of this nature is to develop respect and empathy for others while holding a micro and macro perspective. This paper will describe the different perspective on change by those who like it and those who dread it, explain why readiness for change is so crucial to its success, show how change agents are essential for employee engagement, discuss how different perspectives and agendas impact the change, and explain how change can best be managed.

Change Management is a process that proceeds in steps, which generally consist of preparation, management, and reinforcement (NHS, 2011). The first of these steps—preparation—requires that the change manager gain a sense of what stakeholders think about the way the environment currently is and what they think about proposed change. As Doll, Cornelison, Rath and Syme (2017) explain, actualizing change depends upon involving stakeholders and obtaining their input and feedback on various proposals and change ideas. The more involved stakeholders are in the process of change, from the beginning, the more likely they are to embrace the change during the implementation stage.

The management stage, which is where implementation goes live, requires managers to use change agents—stakeholders (generally employees) who are supportive of the change and can promote it among other employees. Resistance to change occurs when management has failed to identify all the perspectives and opposing points of view to change. To promote change, the manager must explain rationally why the change is needed, give a vision of the benefits that the change will bring, and demonstrate supportiveness. Not everyone is going to like the change, but that does not mean they have to resist it. Resistance is a...…Change management. This allows for the integration of employees’ opinions and thoughts throughout the change process from beginning to end. The more that management allows workers to invest in the process, the more willing employees are to take ownership of the change process and embrace it as something that they themselves are doing rather than as something that is being done to them.

In conclusion, change is a process that has numerous psychological and sociological components: managers must be aware of the risk of resistance and of ways to mitigate that risk. If managers in a health care setting can incorporate the views of nurses and physicians into the change process they will benefit from involving stakeholders at the earliest stages and reduce the risk of obstacles to change developing later on. Change agents and a guiding coalition made up of workers who are supportive of and knowledgeable of the change should be used by change managers to facilitate the process overall. A clear rationale for the change should always be given as the foundational explanation for why the change is required.

References

Doll, G. A., Cornelison, L. J.,…