Summary: The Functional Nursing Care Model

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According to Dubois, et al., 2013, the functional nursing care model is particularly significant in units where nurses must exhibit their highest skills. Registered Nurses and Licensed Practical Nurses have different job description. It is the duty of the primary nurse to oversee the team performance, but due to the limited job depiction of LPNs’, the RNs end up with an enormous amount of work which may result in them being over stressed. Whenever there is shortage of staff, two CNAs must render care to forty residents and the task must be accomplished as expected within the eight-hour shift. Although, the shift is for eight hours, nevertheless, the nurse ends up working longer hours to make sure that quality of care was rendered to all the …show more content…
The functional nursing care model does not adopt the primary nursing approach but rather assigns nurses definite roles. According to Finkelman, functional nursing is a task-oriented method, concentrating on completing the task which results in greater staff discontent, “with staff feeling they are just grinding out tasks” (2016, p.112). The disadvantages of this model are compromising of individual care as well as falling the risk of fragmented care (Finkelman, 2016). I consent with Finkelman and I also convey my dissatisfaction toward such approach, in that when nurses focus on getting the job done and are unaware of the need of others and the type of care provided, it hampers the quality of care provided which may be harmful to the care receiver. The nursing home is highly bureaucracy in rules and regulation, refusing to identify the benefits of current staff, difference in views of the care provided between interdisciplinary team and administrator. The expectation of the administration is enormously high, focusing on getting the work done in a timely manner, which leads to work overload and feeling of exhaustion for the healthcare team. Nurses are time conscious, they lack adequate time to develop a rapport and get to know their patients better, they just want to finish the tasks assigned to them. Nevertheless, the task gets accomplished, but I cannot ascertain that …show more content…
I often feel like nurses are there simply for administering medications/treatments as transcribed on the EMR. They have no quality time for a heart-to-heart discussion regarding their patients nor completing a thorough assessment on their patients. I have observed several times, nurses failing to document important information on a newly admitted patient on admission, which in most cases results in discrepancy between the administration, nursing manager and the nurse involved. Residents and their families were concerned that nursing staff exclusively focused on hurrying to accomplish all tasks during the shift and devote no extra time to dialog with their residents. This leaves the nurse and the interdisciplinary team with the feeling of isolation, self-reliant and task-oriented care rather than focusing on the residents’ needs. This is the situation faced by majority of the long-term care facilities in the