Abstract
Abstract : Nursing leadership is the process of inspiring, effective communication of the vision, empowerment, transfer of enthusiasm, ensuring assertiveness, and building relationships with followers and relevant significant others in the nursing environment. The leadership role of a nurse manager in a mining primary healthcare service is to inspire and empower facility managers and nursing personnel in the primary healthcare clinics, in order to provide quality primary healthcare service to mine employees. Mining services’ leadership is characterised by defined and organised traditional leadership structures, and a strong union influence. This inhibits nurse managers’ autonomy in a mining primary healthcare service from exercising their leadership roles, which include making decisions, and inspiring and empowering their followers. Instead, they then choose to follow mining management and unions’ directives rather than to lead, and adhere to their stakeholders’ directives. Thus, it is against this background that the researcher sought to explore and describe the experiences of nurse managers of their leadership roles in a specific mining primary healthcare service in the West Rand. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the nurse managers’ experiences of their leadership roles in a specific mining primary healthcare service, in order to develop recommendations to enhance their leadership roles. A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, and contextual research design was used in this study, following a constructivist paradigm. In-depth, phenomenological, individual interviews were conducted to collect data on nurse managers from the specific mining primary healthcare services, who were willing to participate. Field notes were taken to support the data, and the participants gave permission to use an audio tape-recorder to record the data. The study was conducted into two phases. Phase 1 focused on an exploration and a description of nurse managers’ experiences of their leadership roles in a specific mining primary healthcare service. In Phase 2, recommendations were derived from the findings of Phase 1. The study was guided by the theoretical framework of Winkler’s role theory...
M.Cur. (Community Nursing Sciences)