The Care to Delegate to the Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) and Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA)

 

For the CNA, it would be essential for them to provide care to client number 5, a 74-year-old female with new-onset dementia, toileting, assistance with bathing, eating, and hygiene, among others. Common tasks delegated to nurse assistants involve most daily living activities: bathing, feeding, ambulating, taking vital signs, and performing skincare. Additionally, the CNA is expected to continue receiving call lights as long as the situation is safe and allows them to do so. The LPN could be delegated to care involving measurements of physiologic function, observation of a client’s subjective and objective signs and symptoms, and performing assessments under the supervision of an RN (Connor et al., 2021). It would be ensured that the LPN competently performs the dressing change to the burns if there are signs and symptoms of infection or necrosis in the affected areas. If the LPN is unsure, they will inform me or the RN on shift. Lastly, the stability of both the clients’ verses, alertness and orientation, respiratory status, and pain in their patients would be ensured and let me know or another RN on a shift of any changes.

The Clients Care from the Highest to Lowest Priority

When prioritizing patient care, it requires classifying patient conditions into high, intermediate, or low priority. The high-priority conditions or life-threatening ones include airway, breathing, and circulation. Intermediate needs are non-life-threatening and non-emergent, and low-priority needs are those unrelated to the patient’s illness (Eissa, 2022). To follow this logic, it is clear that the client in respiratory distress needs to be seen immediately, followed by the client with the broken femur who is stable but requires care for pain management and in addition to being observed for apparent signs or symptoms or trauma, infection, or circulatory issues potentially related to the broken femur. In the case of infection control, addressing the client who needs their burn dressings changed would be essential. From the information provided, the client is stable, and one would anticipate administering pain medication before the dressing change. The administration of the medication would allow time for efficacy before dressing change which would be used to set eyes upon the remaining three patients. It would be essential to ensure that the recent onset dementia client is safe and comfortable with the CNA. When the aide reports no issues and does not require a break, one would obtain VS PRN and move on to look at the last client. The last client requires discharge planning and education; the RN may only complete it. When the client is safe to get a discharge, it is within reason to believe that they are the most medically healthy and stable patient and therefore, the lowest priority of care is required at the time.

Conclusion

Delegation is assigning activities or tasks related to patient care to unlicensed assistant personnel while retaining accountability for the outcome, and also termed as the process where a nurse directs another person to perform a nursing task and activities. Prioritization can be understood as deciding which problem or issue requires more immediate action and which can tolerate a delayed response until they are no more urgent. For the LPN assigning client number 2, the-46-year-old female with full-thickness burns and client number 3, the 33-year-old male firefighter with a broken right femur, would be appropriate. When prioritizing patient care requires classifying patient conditions into high, intermediate, or low priority where the high-priority conditions or life-threatening ones include airway, breathing, and circulation and intermediate needs are non-life-threatening and non-emergent, and low-priority needs are those unrelated to the patient’s illness

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