Poster Presentation
Friday, July 13, 2007
9:30 AM - 10:15 AM
Friday, July 13, 2007
3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Exploring the Impact of the Skill Mix Model on Clinical Care from Nurses' Perspective
Yung-Fang Liou, MSN, RN and Bieng-Yi Chang, MSN, RN. Department of Nursing, Tri-Service General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
| Learning Objective #1: The learner will be able to understand the content of workload redistribution resulting from hospital nursing practice reform in a medical center in Taiwan. |
| Learning Objective #2: The learner will be able to understand nurses’ perceptions of, and satisfaction with, health care assistants in a medical center in northern Taiwan. |
The skill mix model was adopted in several hospitals to solve the problem of nursing staff shortage after the Department of Health of Taiwan had developed the health care assistants (HCAs) training program in 2003. The purpose of this study was to explore the nurses’ perspective of working with HCAs, as well as to further understand the impact on adopting the skill mix model clinically. A convenience sample of 40 nurses was taken from 3 internal medicine wards of a medical center in northern Taiwan, where the staff mix included HCAs allocation. Results showed that within 41 tasks performed by HCAs, 10 were selected by over 50% respondents in both the “delegation most” and “effect on staff workload” sections. In terms of the nurses’ perspective of the skill mix model, over 55% of nurses positively perceived client care and working relationships between HCAs and nurses. However, only 25% and 35% respondents expressed satisfaction with HCA’s level of expertise and working performance, respectively. No statistical significance was found between demographic data and nurses’ perspective of HCAs. These results contributed to understanding the attributes of HCAs in a nursing care context and providing reference value with regards to the implementation of the skill mix model.