Advocacy is defined as the act of supporting a proposal or cause, therefore, an advocate pleads, defends or supports a particular cause for the interest of others (Thomas, 2018). Nurse managers’ positions innately involve advocacy. According to Porter-O’Grady (2018) as stewards for creating safety and healthy environments that support the functions of health care teams and patient environment, nurse managers are in a better position to determine lacking aspects, aspects that need improvements, or changes that should be implemented to create optimum working environments. In general, their advocacy actions include ensuring proper allocation of resources and promoting positive environments. For instance, in the face of budget scrutiny, workflow change or work process design, nurse managers can fulfil their advocacy role by safeguarding nursing resources. They can involve their staff in the budgeting process to promote understanding of the challenges in the modern-day healthcare systems.

On the other hand, the advocacy role towards patients happens among point-of-care nurses (Davoodvand, Abbaszadeh & Ahmadi, 2016). The voice of nurses at the bedside is important in decisions related to patient care and the healthcare environment. The inevitable contact between these professionals and patients make them the best candidates to best represent their grievances, desires and requests to organizational panels for effective decision making. They can also present evidence-based concepts for bettering patient care (Davoodvand, Abbaszadeh & Ahmadi, 2016). For example, a nurse can advocate for the palliative care approach to provide access, to patients with life-limiting illnesses, to health care that is reactive to their holistic prerequisites, upholds a standard quality of life and is delivered by interprofessional teams- a shift from the present traditional focus of providing such care only to cancer patients.