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Holding up a mirror to nursing teams today reveals an array of diversity 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.

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.

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).

Figure 1

. An adapted model of EDI from Pollock et al (2022) for nursing leaders

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.

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

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.