A systematic review of facilitators and barriers to task reallocation from medicine to nursing domain

Introducing new nursing roles in healthcare practices thus often implies redesigning the organisation and raises discussions on workforce change and professionalism. This applies especially when these roles operate in between, and in the overlap of, the traditional professional domains of medicine and nursing. This paper focuses on the introduction of new nursing roles that cause or warrant interdisciplinary workforce change. The disciplinary boundaries of nursing are expanded by taking on work that is traditionally performed by other disciplines, particularly physicians.

Before redesigning health organisations to enable the introduction of NPs, it is important to understand what facilitators and barriers may be expected in task reallocation. If these factors are not taken into account they might hamper the (cost-)effective execution of task reallocation in actual practice.

This review explores what facilitators and barriers have been found in earlier evaluations and studies of task reallocation from the professional domain of medicine to the domain of nursing.