If delivery of a health care service is delegated to a paraprofessional what might be an unitended consequense?

Answer 1

I'm tempted to answer that the patient might unintentionally be subjected to a higher level of care.... but I digress. By definition, paraprofessionals are not as focused or schooled in the subject at hand. This means that any emergent effects that are not an obvious and clear result of the patient's original condition and expected prognosis may be unnoticed or misinterpreted. As such, the remedy to this emergent condition may not be spot on. This might lead the inexperienced to conclude that a team of doctors working full time on patient care would be optimum. This however is exactly not the case. In this age of specialization, doctoral members of the treatment team may well be unskilled in the day-to-day delivery of ongoing patient care. It's my experience that most practiced nurses, for example, are more likely to get better results at IV injections than a General Practice doctor, if only for the simple reason that the nurse will do this a lot more times in her career than the doctor will. So in fact, my first, ironic statement is actually a truth; one unintended consequence of delivering patient care into the hands of the rightparaprofessional may in fact yield unexpectedly better caregiving.