Delegation, Essay Example

Delegating, which involves entrusting someone with a task, is a fact of life, but especially so in large organizations and particularly in the health care field.

1. Nurses can spend up to two hours per day taking comprehensive case histories upon patients’ admission to a ward.  Yet some of this is unnecessary duplication since many patients arriving from the ER bring with them a fairly complete case history.
2. Many people tend to underdelegate mostly because they fear that someone else will not do the job properly but also because they believe that if the jobs are done very well, their own positions may be taken over by efficient subordinates. In the hospital where I work there is a head nurse of a ward who only delegates to her assistant head nurse if there is no other choice; and in this way, although she works hard, she does not do as good of a job as possible.
3. Reverse delegation is when subordinates train their bosses to do their work (Cut to the Core).  For example, I have witnessed some LPNs repeatedly telling RNs on their ward how much better their wound dressings are than their own; and soon the RNs are doing most of them!
4. Overdelegation is delegating all jobs that can possibly be delegated, something that I have seen happening a lot in the hospital in which I work. An example is  LPNs sometimes getting a care aid to carry out the majority of the care of one or more of their patients

Works Cited

Cut to the Core.  Reverse delegation.  Retrieved on August 15, 2012, from http://cut2thecore.com/blog/7p=46.