Nurses can avoid folding clothes and washing up vomit

It is possible that the health workers committee will suggest that the skills of nurses be used in a better way than today. Lill Sverresdatter Larsen believes the solution isn’t necessarily more health workers.

Lill Sverresdatter Larsen, President of the Nurses’ Association, believes there is plenty of room for a redistribution of tasks that nurses do today.

– You need to think about what the patient needs, and the tasks are solved at the lowest level of competence, Larsen tells Dagens Medisin.

It is not just about assigning tasks to doctors or health professionals.

A survey conducted by the Nurses Syndicate in 2019, Mentioned by Sykepleien, showed that 60 percent of all nurses perform daily tasks that they themselves do not define as nursing tasks. If you include those who say they do such tasks weekly, it’s 80 percent.

– It’s not even the job of healthcare workers. This is, for example, getting clothes from the laundry, folding them and putting them in the lockers. It’s much more than that, Larsen says.

Nurses in hospitals also said they often act as porters. In addition, there are cleaning tasks. According to Larsen, janitors in their duties should not wash away bodily fluids. Therefore, washing becomes a nursing task.

– When the patient is sick, there can naturally be vomiting, blood and stool. The nurse has to wash all of that off. The best solution would be private cleaners that nurses can call when needed. The nurses have experience with infection control and cleaning, Larsen says, but we don’t need to wash these beds.

In nursing homes, Larsen believes that the responsibility of making bread, for example, need not be a nurse’s job. Refer to nursing homes and hospitals that have introduced HOSTS Diet with great success.

– It sounds rude when I say nurses don’t need to butter slices of bread, but when you hire food attendants, it’s been a positive experience. Nurses can plan the diet, but they don’t have to collect food, Larsen says.

She believes that there is not necessarily a discussion about how tasks should be distributed among nurses, doctors and health professionals.

For health care workers, its clear impression is that it is the responsibility of management to distribute tasks so that the right person gets the tasks that are adapted to their skills.

– Health professionals in municipal health and care services have been assigned many tasks for which they have no competence, says Larsen.

Nurses and health care workers have overlapping competencies, and Larsen believes the division of duties should be done at the departmental level.

Municipal managers are responsible for an average of 93 workers. They have no chance at sea. They also have jobs during the day on business 24/7.

There are many examples of nurses taking on tasks that would normally be done by doctors. Clinical general nurses, for example, have been assigned tasks in outpatient clinics within gastroscopy and colonoscopy. In Ahus Urology, general clinical nurses have taken over the tasks previously performed by urologists.

– But most nurses are not very interested in taking over from doctors. We have enough, says Larsen.