Introduction: The Significance of Delegation Skills in Nursing
The skills of delegation must be the most essential ones for the nursing staff to acquire. Presupposing that the healthcare personnel should provide sensible clinical judgment on a specific issue and give account of their role in the intervention procedure (Kaplan & Ura, 2010), delegation skills develop responsibility in nurses.
In addition, the necessity to adopt an efficient time management approach in order to address the most important objectives emerged in nursing. As a result, the phenomenon of prioritizing was suggested as the means to handle the nursing tasks adequately and within the deadline set.
Article Summary: What Weydt Has to Say
In her article Developing delegation skills, Weydt (2010) provides a detailed account of the current concept of delegation as a phenomenon and specifies the roles that the nursing staff plays in the process of delegation, describing the types of delegation (i.e., unit based, paired, partnered, etc.) and specifying the key opportunities, which each type provides, as well as the basic challenges that each of the delegation types poses to the nursing staff. In other words, Weydt deals with the accountability issues emerging in the course of the delegation and the roles that the LPN and the RN staff must be assigned with.
It is also important to stress that Weydt touches upon the issue of prioritizing as well, though not as explicitly as she does discussing the issue of delegation. To start with, the author mentions in her article clearly whose duty it is to prioritize in nursing, as well as outlines the key stages of prioritizing, therefore, defining the entire process in a nutshell: “The nursing assistant is often left to prioritize the multiple tasks given by differing RNs who are unaware of one another’s requests of the assistant” (Weydt, 2010, 18).Thus, Weydt also outlines the key challenge in prioritizing in nursing practice, making it obvious that the lack of communication in the course of prioritizing can cause drastic effects.
However, Weydt evidently focuses on the issue of delegation, whereas prioritizing comes as a close second in her research of challenges in nursing practice. While the research focuses on the problem of delegating responsibilities from one of the employees to another one, Weydt stresses the necessity to use efficient time management by getting the nursing priorities straight. It is quite peculiar that, to demonstrate the necessity to prioritize tasks in nursing, Weydt considers a specific scenario, while the rest of the theories I her paper come without the support of any case studies or scenarios to consider. Therefore, it can be assumed that the significance of prioritizing, though not emphasized in the paper, is rather high.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Research: Methodology and Discussion
The introduction of different assignment patterns, which can possibly occur in case of delegation in nursing seems key strength of the given paper. It would have been easier to give a basic definition of the phenomenon and proceed with its analysis; however, instead, Weydt introduces a very detailed classification and a very impressive analysis of the latter. As for the major weakness, the lack of examples (e.g., case studies used as references) should be mentioned.
Conclusion: The Future of Delegating Skills Practice
Although Weydt’s article has its problems, it still offers a very detailed account of the phenomenon of delegation in nursing, which is why it is worth being considered a decent research. Making it clear that delegation is a very efficient nursing strategy, Weydt, therefore, promotes the latter as the means to improve the current management approaches adopted in nursing.
Reference List
Kaplan, B. & Ura, D. (2010). Use of multiple patient stimulators to enhance prioritizing and delegating skill for senior nursing students. Journal of Nursing Education, 49(7), 371–377.
Weydt, A. (2010). Developing delegation skills. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 15(2), 1–25.