Difference Between Assigning and Delegating Work
While administering quality health care and practical work criterion has to be laid down, and it should be well understood by the personnel to affect patient safety and outcome positively. Assigning and delegating work can be quite complicated, depending on the instances in which they occur. Understanding how and when each of them is applicable is the head start of the satisfactory and smooth performance of required tasks.
Delegation of work in the sector of health care and life sciences can be described as the transfer of the responsibility of one health worker for the performance of a task to another equally trained and capable worker while retaining answerability for the outcome (Potter, Deshields, &Kuhrik, 2010). In this case, however, the duty imposed on the health care worker is outside their role description. The overall client care and decision making are left entirely in the hands of the delegating worker.
Assigning of work, on the other, hand happens when the requisite duty falls within the health care provider’s role description, and it aligns with the training described by the employer or supervisor (Sir, Dundar, Steege, &Pasupathy, 2015). The employers are in charge and liable for coming up with the role description that dictates the type of tasks assigned to their employees. The employees are accountable to their supervisors for the satisfactory performance of the tasks assigned to them.
Assignments fall within the role description of a worker while the delegation of work is outside of the worker’s specialization but within the tasks they handle. Either way, these tasks are given to qualified and responsible health workers. All the workers need to differentiate the capacities at which these exercises apply to maximize their performance.
References
Potter, P., Deshields, T., & Kuhrik, M. (2010). Delegation practices between registered nurses and nursing assistive personnel. Journal of nursing management, 18(2), 157-165.
Sir, M. Y., Dundar, B., Steege, L. M. B., & Pasupathy, K. S. (2015). Nurse–patient assignment models considering patient acuity metrics and nurses’ perceived workload. Journal of biomedical informatics, 55, 237-248.