Articles
Delegation is an art that involves working with the rest of the people in the nursing team in order to accomplish tasks and objectives that cannot be done by a single person. In the modern day delegation in nursing in all inclusive of even the staff nurses all the way up the chain of command to the nursing managers, compared to the past years when it was more oriented towards only the nursing managers (Kelly & Marthaler, 2005). Nonetheless, it is worth noting that still, the individual Registered Nurses (RN) have the role of determining the various tasks that are to be delegated. Despite such mandate and requirement that the registered nurses should encourage delegation as a way of nurturing skills, there are role that should not be delegated. I recently witnessed a scenario of over delegation.
A senior nurse, with the reason of being away from the workplace for a private duty delegated critical roles to a new and junior staff. The nursing tasks were delegated at a time when the condition of the resident was not stable and in my opinion, highly required the RN to keep assessing the particular resident prior to the delegation task (Kelly & Marthaler, 2011). To add on this, she also allowed the junior new staff to take over and oversee the administration of the intramuscular (IM) injections to the patient. These are two major roles that are a sign of over delegation for a new nurse. The outcome was detrimental because the instructions upon delegation were not clearly followed.
The injection schedule was not followed as required thus putting the life of the patient at risk. Cases of under delegation are also common and often have an outcome of demotivation to the staffs who feel undermined by their seniors. I can thus conclude that in most cases, nurses who have little professional experience are always reluctant in delegating roles than those who are experienced. There should be confidence while delegating so as to develop mutual trust between colleagues and effective communication (LaCharity, Kumagai, & Bartz, 2013).
References
Kelly, P., & Marthaler, M. T. (2005). Delegation of nursing care. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson/Delmar Learning. Kelly, P., & Marthaler, M. T. (2011).
Nursing delegation, setting priorities, and making patient care assignments. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning. LaCharity, L. A., Kumagai, C. K., & Bartz, B. (2013).
Prioritization, delegation, and assignment: Practice exercises for the NCLEX examination.
