How can nurse leaders promote equality, diversity and inclusion?

Understanding and addressing the barriers nurse leaders themselves face is an important starting point to strategising equal access and opportunities in nursing

Fostering a culture of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) has rapidly become crucial to cultivating a positive and harmonious working environment in nursing practice. By holding up a mirror to nursing teams today, there would be an array of diverseness that nursing leaders have to champion in their teams. However, they face barriers that impede their progress. This article explores strategies for nurse leaders to overcome these barriers and promote EDI effectively.

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First, it is essential to understand and address the barriers facing nursing leaders when strategising plans for EDI development. Understanding and addressing these barriers is essential for fostering an inclusive leadership paradigm in nursing, ensuring that EDI initiatives are not merely aspirational, but actively contribute to a transformative and equitable healthcare environment.

Four characteristics for developing inclusive leadership

Pollock et al (2022) identified four key characteristics for developing inclusive leadership (Figure 1). Their work stemmed from the lens of investigating equity in engineering, but the author has adapted a model of EDI to suit the needs of nursing leaders.

From Pollock et al’s (2022) adapted model of EDI, true inclusivity in nursing can be achieved from the following four steps:

1. Self-reflection and awareness

Examining your positionality from your beliefs, values, mindset, conscious and unconscious bias and identity. By identifying your core values, you can begin to make sense of the triggers and emotions you face when confronting equity and recognising significant needs for self-change. This can be achieved by educating oneself to gather new insights and fresh perspectives of the world around us (Gagnon et al 2021).

2. Structural thinking

By exploring the structural landscape of EDI, nursing leaders can get a breadth of the definition of EDI from a macro viewpoint; this enables nursing leaders to clear the ambiguity and tensions that surround EDI in the workplace. Discussing definitions and processes of EDI with your teams enables the creation of cultures that embrace inclusion and help eradicate the underlying biases that occur in nursing teams (Booysen and Gill 2020).

3. Cultivating equality, diversity and inclusion practices

Nurse leader inclusiveness begins with cooperative communication with information exchanges, which is crucial in establishing factors that affect EDI in the workplace. Nurse leader inclusiveness focuses on openness along with the construction and promotion of identity, diversity and enhancing pathways to performance. Most importantly, it is essential to learn from mistakes and failures in EDI and adjust the face of professional diversity (Mitchell et al 2015).

4. Shared experiences

Sharing lived experiences is significant in synthesising EDI perspectives. Nursing is now critically tasked with examining and responding to EDI in practice.

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Nurse leaders are required to make planned efforts to develop strategies for EDI and they must start by acknowledging the lived experiences of nurses involved in EDI. This requires a commitment of understanding how EDI affects all members of the nursing team and implementation of strategies with a need to look for solutions which dismantle systems and structures of inequities (Nardi et al 2020).

Nurse leaders should return to grassroots creative thinking

Nurse leaders need to branch out from following the entrenched EDI policies that are constantly changing and return to grassroots creative thinking with the following points:

• Establishing connections and building relationships through relational practices.
• Providing and empowering nurses with opportunities to thrive in their surroundings.
• Strengthening self-assurance and fostering a sense of a supportive community in the nursing environment.
• Cultivating and encouraging talent through recognition, development and celebration.

In addition, concepts of racial discrimination, race-based biases, and other biases in society and nursing need to be discussed at student level in all settings where members of the nursing team work. Incorporating this discussion in nursing practice challenges preconceptions and fosters a more emphatic and impartial approach to equity. Moreover, these conversations encourage a culture of continuous learning and sensitivity in the nursing profession, with a need to understand societal, cultural and racial nuances.

Openly recognising and addressing the barriers of EDI in nursing leadership enables a change in thinking rooted in fairness, respect, and the continuous pursuit of an inclusive and discrimination-free healthcare leadership environment. This, in turn, starts the navigation of creating an equitable and inclusive leadership culture.

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In conclusion, the first step to overcoming barriers in EDI is to recognise your biases and acknowledge how assessment of institutional EDI policies and practices can create a practical definition of diversity in your nursing team. Following that, embedding EDI in nursing practice stems from interventions with communication from a human-centred approach, encapsulating a collective conscience and commitment to advocating for diversity in nursing.

This demands a collective conscience and unwavering commitment to advocate for EDI in nursing, while remembering that EDI practice is a continually evolving process. Nursing practices and leadership can authentically embody EDI grounded by human-centred care by embracing these principles.

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

Rohit Sagoo is director of British Sikh Nurses, London, England

References

• Booysen L, Gill P (2020) Creating a culture of inclusion through diversity and equity. In Viera AJ, Kramer R (Eds) Management and Leadership Skills for Medical Faculty and Healthcare Executives. Springer-Verlag, Cham, 135-144 (Last accessed: 20 March 2024.)
• Gagnon S, Augustin TJ, Cukier W (2021). Interplay for change in equality, diversity and inclusion studies. Human Relations. 75, 7, 1327-1353. doi: 10.1177/00187267211002239 (Last accessed: 20 March 2024.)
• Mitchell R, Boyle B, Parker V et al (2015) Managing inclusiveness and diversity in teams: how leader inclusiveness affects performance through status and team identity. Human Resource Management. 54, 2, 217-239. doi: 10.1002/hrm.21658 (Last accessed: 20 March 2024.)
• Nardi D, Waite R, Nowak M et al (2020) Achieving health equity through eradicating structural racism in the United States: a call to action for nursing leadership. Journal of Nursing Scholarship. 52, 6, 696-704. doi: 10.1111/jnu.12602 (Last accessed: 20 March 2024.)
• Pollock M, Holly J, Leggett-Robinson P (2022) Inclusive leadership development for engineers. In Kendall MR, Rottmann C (Eds) Student Leadership Development in Engineering. Wiley, Hoboken NJ, 119-128. doi: 10.1002/yd.20483 (Last accessed: 20 March 2024.)