Nursing Team Members' Perception of Their Own and Each Other's Roles: Master of Nursing/ Elizabeth Kusi-Appiah

Abstract

In the now vast literature on healthcare workforce utilization, the discourse on nursing team memb ers’ role contribution has mainly centered on the use of healthcare institutional goals and quantitative outcomes measures such a s healthcare cost, patients’ morbidity and mortality rate and patients’ satisfaction. Although such benchmark can be helpful in a scertaining the role contributions of the nursing team members, it also limits our understanding on the meanings nursing team mem bers assign to their own roles amidst the complexities and challenges they encounter in the day to day enactment of their roles. This thesis aimed to provide an emic knowledge on how registered nurses (RNs), Licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and healthcare ai des (HCAs) describe their role contributions in patient care as well as the extent to which the team members understood the roles of their teammates. In doing so, an integrative review was first conducted to explore the nursing team members’ perception of th eir own and each other’s roles. The findings of the integrative review revealed a paucity of literature on the topic. Consequentl y, a secondary analysis of a qualitative study exploring nursing team member’s role in the care of hospitalized older adults in o ne geriatric and one medical unit in the West Coast of Canada was conducted. Qualitative descriptive study and conventional conte nt analysis approach guided the analysis of 34 transcripts, fields and participants’ profiles. Four themes were developed to desc ribe the work roles of the nursing team members: RNs’ perceptions of their roles, LPNs’ perceptions of their roles, HCAs’ percept ions of their roles and nursing team member’s perceptions of each other’s roles. The findings of the study suggested the presence of role ambiguity, confusion and tension among nursing team members. This study identifies an opportunity for nursing stakeholde rs to develop pragmatic strategies for improving nursing team member’s collaboration by supporting their understanding of the rol es of their teammates