Introduction
Without any regulation in place for a role within the healthcare
professions, there is room for dangerous errors to be made and for
standards not to be kept high. This is why there are registered
nursing courses and long laborious University and medical school
training routes for doctors, surgeons and other healthcare
professionals. What about the lower level assistant jobs though, such
as Healthcare Assistants?
The Role of the Healthcare Assistants
The role of the Healthcare Assistant is to provide basic care to a
patient, including monitoring their temperature, taking blood pressure
readings, helping maintain their personal hygiene and feeding and
changing them if needed. It may seem that tasks like these are pretty
standardised and hard to make an error in, but more and more
Healthcare Assistants have to perform more important tasks in patient
care as nurses start to buckle under the workload. It may not have
been in the Healthcare Assistant’s training to perform nurse jobs such
as giving injections, and if performed incorrectly there could be
complications.
Education of Healthcare Assistants
To become a Healthcare Assistant you do not need any specific
qualifications, just a good education and good work experience, the
training is provided on the job, but it appears there is no
across-the-board standard, and any real regulation of the job does not
exist. Therefore it is hard to know from one hospital to the next,
one Healthcare Assistant to another what skills have been gained and
to what level.
Some Healthcare Assistants may be carrying out what
could be considered as nursing jobs, but not at the same standard as a
nurse would in terms of patient care and knowledge of the job in hand.
Also, worryingly, a lack of regulation could mean that there's no way
of striking off an incompetent worker and stopping them trying to find
work at another hospital.
Healthcare Assistant Survey by Royal College of Nursing (RCN)
In a survey conducted amongst Healthcare Assistants earlier this year
by Ipsos MORI on behalf of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), a
staggering 85% of Healthcare Assistants said they feel that their work
should be regulated, with 89% being willing to pay towards the
regulation. Dr Peter Carter, RCN Chief Executive &General Secretary
said in response “The Healthcare Assistant members in the survey were
keen to be professionally regulated alongside registered nurses and
almost all saw official recognition of their role and protecting the
good name of HCAs as benefits of professional regulation, alongside
increased trust and confidence from registered nurses and the public.”
More recently the Royal College of Nursing in Wales has called for the
regulation of Healthcare Workers. RCN Wales director Tina Donnelly has
said she has long been arguing for the regulation and has herself
experienced problems with things going wrong when her blood pressure
was not taken correctly. A series of incorrect readings would have
led to her being treated for a condition she doesn’t actually have.
Within Wales, a multidisciplinary group is being set up to form some
regulatory structure for Healthcare Assistants, however, it has been
stressed that the regulations must support the role’s current
flexibility.
About the Author: Sarah Potter works
for http://www.nurses.co.uk. Nurses.co.uk is a specialist Nursing Jobs website featuring thousands of nurse vacancies, nursing news, nurse blogs, nurses forum and more
for nurses in the United Kingdom.
