Aims and objectives: To explore registered nurses', licensed practical nurses' and healthcare aides' perceptions of their own and each other's role contributions.
Background: In response to contemporary economic and political pressures, healthcare institutions across the world have endeavoured to download job duties to less educated healthcare providers. As a result, nursing care is usually delivered by a team of nursing staff that have different roles. This means that there are fewer registered nurses and more licensed practical nurses and healthcare aides on nursing teams, despite evidence that increased numbers of registered nurses improve patient safety and care outcomes.
Design: This study was an integrative review using Whittemore and Knafl's stages for ensuring rigour. These stages include problem identification, literature searching, data evaluation, data analysis and presentation.
Methods: Four electronic databases were searched according to previously designed search strategies. The 14 retrieved articles were appraised using MMATs for quality. Data were extracted and analysed thematically.
Results: The findings of the integrative review revealed that registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and healthcare aides had little understanding about the roles of their fellow nursing team members and had difficulties describing their own roles. However, no studies concurrently examined registered nurses', licensed practical nurses' and healthcare aides' perceptions on their own or each other's roles and little were written about licensed practical nurses.
Conclusion: More research is needed to examine the entire nursing team's perceptions about the various nursing roles.
Keywords: care safety; healthcare aides; licensed practical nurse; nursing skill mix; registered nurses; role perceptions; task shifting.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.