It was a busy evening shift in your ward. Your medication round is behind time and you wanted to speed up the process. You place each patient’s pills in a cup and then, one at-a-time, handed the cup to a student in the medication room to take to the patient. Each of the patients for which she does this is able to swallow the pills and a little water.
Every organization exists to do work, from large hospitals and even to the wards. Work has to be coordinated and performed through the planning of individuals who have the responsibility to ensure the various tasks and different aspects of work are completed. In other words to say, managers have to assign work appropriately to the competency of their staff. “The organizational structure is a formal plan for arranging people in order to their Authority and Responsibility to achieve defined objectives.” (Grohar-Murray & DiCroce, 1992). Based on the scenario, the staff nurse did not assess the student’s ability and competence before delegating the task. There was also poor supervision and wrong direction of what should have been done.
In the next few paragraphs I will resolve the problems and demonstrate how it shouldn’t have been a problem at all. Also, define what delegation is and point out how effective delegation applies to the case scenario. …show more content…
The manager, or seniors have to assess and identify each staff thoroughly before delegating the task to the appropriate persons, being the novice, the newly qualified nurse, the competent nurse, the proficient nurse and the expert nurse. This is known from Patricia Benner’s model of From Novice to Expert (Benner & Benner,1984). This model effectively demonstrates how each task has to be delegated to the appropriate persons of the appropriate level of competence. This model further emphasizes on what was mentioned in the earlier paragraphs, mainly the importance of careful