Nursing Assistant Case Study

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The situation that occurred was a Nursing Assistant went to give a patient a bed bath and the patient reported the she was itchy. As a result, the Nursing Assistant reported the patient's problem to the Nurse. The Nurse replied that she was to occupied with her other patients and handed the Nursing Assistant a bottle of Benadryl to administer to the the patient. Without hesitation the Nursing Assistant administered the medication to the patient. Later on in the day the Nurse Manager was doing rounds and asked the Nurse for an update on her patient. This is when the Nurse and the Nurse Manager went into the client's room and saw the patient was going into anaphylaxis. As a result, the nurse immediately called the Nursing Assistant into the patient's …show more content…
If the nurse had assessed the patient she would have concluded that the patient suffers from dry skin. As a result, the safe intervention for the patient would have been to apply lotion to relieve the itching.
Those involved in the process of delegation were the Nurse and the Nursing Assistant. The Nurse delegated to the Nursing Assistant to administer a medication. In addition, the Nurse was involved in prioritization when she decided to focus on her other clients and charting, rather than assessing this patient. My thoughts during this situation were that the Nurse failed at delegating and prioritizing. One of the ethical principles of nursing is nonmaleficence, which is to do no harm. In this case the Nurse is responsible for incorrectly delegating a task to a Nursing Assistant that resulted in her patients fatality. I believe that it is the Nurse's responsibility to correctly delegate and to not act or intervene without directly assessing the situation. In addition, the Nursing Assistant should have known that administering medications is out of her scope of practice and should have refused the Nurse's request. In my opinion every health care personnel is responsible for the patients safety and should be aware of what they can