Unregulated Healthcare Providers: Impact, Advantages & Disadvantages

This essay examines the role and impact of unregulated healthcare providers within the healthcare system, focusing on both the positive and negative aspects. It discusses how these workers, often employed to address nursing shortages, contribute to cost savings and alleviate the workload of registered nurses. However, it also highlights concerns regarding their lack of standardized training, potential risks to patient safety, and job dissatisfaction. The essay further analyzes the potential benefits and drawbacks of regulating all healthcare professionals, considering improvements in quality of care and job satisfaction versus the financial implications for healthcare organizations. It concludes by emphasizing the need for healthcare departments to make informed decisions to mitigate potential problems associated with both unregulated and regulated healthcare workforces, while also suggesting further research into the impact of current policies.

Running head: UNREGULATED HEALTHCARE PROVIDER
UNREGULATED HEALTHCARE PROVIDER
Name of the student:
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The term unregulated healthcare worker may be defined as the healthcare professionals
who perform a variety of tasks, some of which are done by regulated healthcare professionals
traditionally. These individuals are mainly appointed to meet the shortage of nurses and they are
not as efficient as registered nurses are. They do not have standard education. They only reduce
the burden of registered nurses by doing simpler tasks that does not require expert nursing skills.
Some of the other titles that are also given to them are generic workers, nurse aides, personal
support worker and many others (Endacott et al., 2018). This assignment will mainly show the
impact of the role in the healthcare centers. It will also show positive and negative aspects of
making all healthcare professional regulatory.
Unregulated healthcare providers have both positive and negative impacts on the
healthcare. They have low salaries and therefore the organizations can utilize the financial
resources in buying newer technological resources, equipments and many others. As no specific
training sessions are allotted to them, the organizations also do not have to spend money often
their training. Therefore huge amount of financial resources are saved that helps the organization
in buying new technologies and maintenance of the healthcare systems (Rigg et al., 2017).
Secondly, when the nurse to patient ration becomes low, the quality of care provided to patient
may also become affected. The unregulated care workers helps nurses by haring their work
burden by doing the easier tasks that they can manage effectively. This helps to provide best
quality patient centered care by the nurses. However, there are certain negative impacts that are
also associated with the role of unregulated healthcare workers. Such workers usually do not
undertake any standard education or practice and therefore the activities conducted by them may
not be evidence based and may impose risks of harm for the patient. Moreover, nurses have
stated that they can never delegate any task to them with full confidence, as they cannot be sure

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about the safety practices and knowledge of the nurse aides (Wardle et al., 2016). Therefore,
continuous supervision is required. Therefore their activities can be sometimes impose risks on
the health of the patient that may lead to unavoidable deaths, long stays and hospitals, hospital
readmissions and others.
One of the biggest issues faced by the unregulated worker is their job dissatisfaction.
They are engaged in job enlargement that means that they perform many tasks but they are
master of none of the tasks. Therefore, by making them come under the category of regulated
nurse, they can be able to undertake training in proper manner and therefore develop their skills
and knowledge. This would help them to provide better care to patient that is not only safe but
also satisfies the patient largely. Therefore, by making them regulated, better quality care and
safe care can be assured to the patients. Moreover, the nurse to patient ratio is increased that in
turn assured physical and mental health stability of all the professionals and therefore the work
burden is equally shared. Therefore chances of burnout, absenteeism and turnover decreases for
all groups of nurses. However, when the healthcare professional becomes regulated, they have to
be provided the salary that is fixed by the national framework by the health department of the
nation (Callander & Fox, 2018). Therefore, the payment that has to be made by every
organization would increase that would result in huge pressure of the financial resources of the
healthcare organizations. Therefore, new advancements in the hospitals would be restricted and
cannot take place. This issue should be raised to the health department so that they can come
with a solution.
From the above discussion, it is seen that unregulated healthcare providers helps to
reduce the workload burden of the nurses when the ratio of nurse patient decreases in healthcare
organization. Moreover, as they have low salary, organizations can use this amount of money for

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other further advancements of the organizations. However, they do not have proper training and
cannot be delegated any task as they do not have standard education for practice. This may
expose patients to risks. If all professionals are made regulated, they will be able to provide high
quality care and would have standard education. Job satisfaction would also increase. However,
this might have pressure on the organization, as there will be huge flow of resources that might
affect other resources. Therefore, healthcare departments would take proper decisions to mitigate
the problems.

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References:
Callander, E. J., & Fox, H. (2018). What are the costs associated with child and maternal
healthcare within Australia? A study protocol for the use of data linkage to identify health
service use, and health system and patient costs. BMJ open, 8(2), e017816.
Endacott, R., O'Connor, M., Williams, A., Wood, P., McKenna, L., Griffiths, D., ... & Cross, W.
(2018). Roles and functions of enrolled nurses in Australia: Perspectives of enrolled
nurses and registered nurses. Journal of clinical nursing, 27(5-6), e913-e920.
Rigg, E. C., Schmied, V., Peters, K., & Dahlen, H. G. (2017). The role, practice and training of
unregulated birth-workers in Australia: A mixed methods study. Women and Birth, 30,
15.
Wardle, J. L., Sibbritt, D., Broom, A., Steel, A., & Adams, J. (2016). Is health practitioner
regulation keeping pace with the changing practitioner and health-care landscape? An
Australian perspective. Frontiers in public health, 4, 91.