Low recruitment of Saudi nationals into the nursing profession, coupled with a growing population, has led to a severe nursing shortage in Saudi Arabia, particularly of nurses with advanced qualifications in clinical nursing. While the role of nurse practitioner has been successfully integrated into the healthcare systems of the U.S., Canada, the UK and Australia for decades, the advanced practice registered nurse (APRN), which includes nurse practitioners and clinical nursing specialists, is still not being implemented effectively in Saudi Arabia due to a variety of regulatory, institutional and cultural barriers. The author looks at some of those barriers and offers recommendations of how they might be overcome. Given that in many parts of the world, nurse practitioners are considered an essential component to meeting healthcare demands, the author considers the question of whether APRNs can find a role in Saudi Arabia’s healthcare system.

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Abstract:Delegation is the key for nurse managers and future leaders in order to guarantee productive outcomes. The use of delegation in nursing management can solve many issues including nurse shortages. The study aimed to describe nurse managers' attitude and competency to delegate effectively in a hospital setting. Descriptive correlational design was used which is a type of non-experimental design to collect data from five hospitals, first is University Hospital affiliated to King Abdulaziz University, other four hospitals are affiliated to the Ministry of health. Non probability purposive sampling technique was used to recruit 90 nurse managers. Data were collected by a questionnaire to measure nurse mangers, attitude and competency in delegation. In general nurse managers were unsure about their attitude towards delegation, but agreed that it saves time. Regarding competency, nurse managers' agreed on the importance of competency and that communication is an important part of delegation. All nurse managers agreed that they were familiar with their legal responsibility regarding delegation. The study concluded that there is a highly significant correlation between the attitude and competency where Pearson correlation coefficient is 0.000**. This study recommended that nurse managers should communicate and facilitate the delegation process through developing clear guidelines as well as creating an environment that supports delegation, resolution of conflict and encourages teamwork.

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