Solutions to the Shortage of Nurses The administration of an ambulator

The severity of the shortage depends upon the geographic location and type of nurses needed. Although, the national shortage is around 11 percent, the shortage in some parts of the country reaches 15 percent. (Raffel & Raffel, 1994).

In response to this nursing shortage administrators in a variety of health care settings are proposing that some supportive nursing activities and tasks should be handled by non-licensed personnel (Aiken & Mullenix, 1987; Evans, 1991; Prescott, 1987). The purpose of this report is to determine the applicability of the this solution to the nursing shortage as it applies to the ambulatory health care setting and to develop a plan of action for use in facilitating the change.

In order to proposed valid solutions to the nurse shortage problem, it is necessary to determine the precise nature of the shortage. Historical and background data is helpful here. In this regard, the shortages of nurses may be a "misnomer" because research from 1974 onward indicates that the notion of shortage appears to be incompatible with available data. Specifically:

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1) delegation involves separation of the nurse's role into nursing and non-nursing activities and then a willingness on the part of the nurse to hand over responsibility for non-nurse tasks to non-nurses. To meet this need, Evans states that nurses must realize that they are delegating only selected activities; they are not delegating nursing. Also, nurses must adopt a new and more flexible perspective of their profession. Delegation as it applies to the health care system in general and nurse practice in particular has been discussed by Sullivan and Decker (1992). According to the authors, if the process of delegation is to be effectively implemented in a health care facility such as a hospital, the following five steps must be taken: 1. Analyze the Job. The delegators (e.g. administrators, nurse managers, RNs, etc.) must analyze the job to be performed in terms of each specific task or activity comprising the whole and then determine which responsibilities can be or should be delegated to others. 2. Analyze Subordinates. In this step, those charged with determining delegation should analyze subordinates' job strengths and weaknesses to determine which tasks could be delegated to each subordinate. This analysis would
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5172
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)

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