Delegating Care Effectively and Safely in Clinical Care

Running head: CLINICAL CARE 1
Leading and Learning: Building Professional Capacity
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

CLINICAL CARE 2
Leading and Learning: Building Professional Capacity
PART A: Delegating Care Effectively and Safely
Introduction
Graduate nurses face several challenges that directly affect them as individuals as well as
the patients they handle as care consumers. The working environment is sometimes chaotic or
fast-paced. Such a working setting is characterized by problems that could impact performance
and care experiences. The most affected practitioners are newly graduated professionals, which
explain why nurses should be aware of the origin and implication of workplace challenges. This
excerpt examines the difficulties posed by care delegation as a nursing practice challenge as well
as its implication on safe person-centered care.
Overview of the Challenge
Delegation of care in nursing is the process whereby nursing leaders direct other
practitioners to undertake specific activities and tasks in line with the scope of care management.
For delegation of duties to occur, there must be at least two parties or individuals where one
offers the direction while the other executes the given instructions (Joint Commission, 2015).
The delegator is often a leader or a person mandated with the responsibility of directing and
offering instruction. Graduate registered nurses are in most cases given the responsibility to
delegate a significant portion of care roles to another trained professional. Care delegation comes
with the responsibility of executing care tasks reliably and dependably. At the same time, the
process of delegation of care requires authority, which emanates from the training received and
the jurisdictions within the organizational policies, job description, and practice guidelines.
When a task is delegated, there is need for comprehensive accountability since, in care

CLINICAL CARE 3
management, safety of patients and the effectiveness of interventions is mandatory. During
delegation, the care responsibility is transferred to another person; however, the graduate
registered nurse remains accountable to the entire outcomes associated with the assigned roles
(Hopkins et al., 2014). In this case, it remains a critical determinant of care outcomes and
consumer experiences, which implies that there is need for practitioners to understand the risks
involved and how to enhance outcomes associated with duty delegation n nursing.
Why the Challenge Pose Difficulties for GRN
There are several reasons why delegation of care poses a great challenge to graduate
registered nurses. Graduate registered nurses are expected to determine the tasks that require
delegation. Therefore, there is always a challenge to determining the legal and ethical scope that
defines each task before making any delegations. Organizational policies are to be considered for
a graduate registered nurse to effectively allocate or assign tasks to other people. Graduate
registered nurses require skills and experience to assess, plan, and evaluate each process to
identify the appropriate person to handle the tasks (Jenkins & Joyner, 2013). The challenge
comes when nurses are expected to delegate complex tasks to experienced practitioners while at
the same time giving roles to newly graduated nurses to improve their expertise. Such a conflict
is based on the need to enhance the safety of patients and treatment intervention outcomes.
After establishing the tasks to be handled, graduate registered nurses are supposed to
consider the impact of the underpinning circumstances associated with delegation of roles. For
example, it is one thing to assign roles to individuals but is another consideration to determine
whether the available resources are enough for task to be undertaken. Moreover, after delegation,
there is need for supervision. The impact of working environment also comes to the picture,
which influences the entire process of care delegation. In this context, it is clear that graduate