Nursing care providers' perceptions on their role contributions in patient care: An integrative review.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

To explore registered nurses', licensed practical nurses' and healthcare aides' perceptions of their own and each other's role contributions.

BACKGROUND

In response to contemporary economic and political pressures, healthcare institutions across the world have endeavoured to download job duties to less educated healthcare providers. As a result, nursing care is usually delivered by a team of nursing staff that have different roles. This means that there are fewer registered nurses and more licensed practical nurses and healthcare aides on nursing teams, despite evidence that increased numbers of registered nurses improve patient safety and care outcomes.

DESIGN

This study was an integrative review using Whittemore and Knafl's stages for ensuring rigour. These stages include problem identification, literature searching, data evaluation, data analysis and presentation.

METHODS

Four electronic databases were searched according to previously designed search strategies. The 14 retrieved articles were appraised using MMATs for quality. Data were extracted and analysed thematically.

RESULTS

The findings of the integrative review revealed that registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and healthcare aides had little understanding about the roles of their fellow nursing team members and had difficulties describing their own roles. However, no studies concurrently examined registered nurses', licensed practical nurses' and healthcare aides' perceptions on their own or each other's roles and little were written about licensed practical nurses.

CONCLUSION

More research is needed to examine the entire nursing team's perceptions about the various nursing roles.