Case Study: Delegation
Jon Burnard is an RN on the 3 to 11 PM shift for a medical unit. The nurse manager has just announced that because of budget cuts, unlicensed assistive personnel (UAP) are going to be hired to assist RNs. Nurse Burnard is assigned to a pod that consists of himself and two unlicensed assistive persons to care for 18 clients. He realizes that he cannot complete the work himself, so he requests a description of the experience, skill level, and familiarity with the hospital of the two unlicensed assistive persons.
After the nurse manager provides him with this information, Nurse Burnard goes home and identifies all the tasks that he must complete in an 8-hour shift. Based on the nurse manager’s description of the unlicensed assistive persons’ experience and skills, he assigns tasks to himself and to them. Finally, he develops a written mini–job description for himself and the unlicensed assistive persons. The next day, Nurse Burnard asks the nurse manager to review the job descriptions that he has developed and asks for input. She is thrilled with the job descriptions and thinks that they are appropriate. He then asks her to provide at least 2 hours of scheduled time for his team to get to know one another and to establish guidelines. Nurse Burnard also requests one 8-hour shift when he and the two nurse’s aides can have half of a normal assignment to try the new job descriptions, work out any bugs, and become comfortable with each others’ expectations.
Questions …show more content…
Is Nurse Burnard using an appropriate delegation process to solve an immediate problem?
Yes, he followed the decision tree for delegation the tasks to unlicensed assistant personal. As stated in scenarios, he requested the description of experience, skills level, and familiarity of UAP to figure out the task that can be delegate to