TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP FOR DISABILITY-INCLUSIVE HEALTHCARE: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR NURSING AND HEALTHCARE WORKFORCE EMPOWERMENT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36563/bkzah863Keywords:
Organizational culture, Workforce empowerment, Accessibility, Health equity, Patient-centred careAbstract
People with disabilities experience persistent healthcare inequities linked to communication, accessibility, workforce competency, and organizational barriers. Transformational leadership is associated with workforce and organizational outcomes in healthcare, particularly nursing, but its role in disability-inclusive healthcare remains underexamined. This narrative review examines how transformational leadership may support disability-inclusive healthcare, with explicit attention to nursing, and proposes a conceptual framework. Structured searches of PubMed/MEDLINE, the WHO publications repository, and publisher and journal platforms (September 1–15, 2026) identified 19 English-language sources meeting explicit inclusion criteria. Sources were synthesized thematically; no meta-analysis or formal quality appraisal was performed. Review-level evidence, drawn largely from nursing, links transformational leadership with staff empowerment, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and safety culture, while the disability literature documents persistent workforce, communication, and organizational barriers. No study directly tested transformational leadership as an intervention for disability-inclusive outcomes. The proposed Transformational Leadership for Disability-Inclusive Healthcare (TLDIH) Framework hypothesizes that leadership contributes to disability-inclusive care primarily by empowering a disability-competent workforce, with co-production with people with disabilities as a cross-cutting principle and contextual conditions as moderators. Transformational leadership is not a stand-alone solution to disability-related health inequity but may strengthen the organizational capacity, including nursing management capacity, needed to translate inclusion policy into practice.
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