Nursing Role Ambiguity in Alberta: The Impact and Institutional Influences

Increasing health system demands and costs, in an economically strained environment, places extraordinary challenges on Alberta’s workforce planners who continue to address critical gaps.  In addition to routine operational planning, unpredictable and often-reactive market demands continuously influence workforce needs.  The role and scope of health care providers’, particularly nurses, is constantly evolving which leads to difficulty interpreting their differences. To achieve successful shifts toward team-based collaborative care, alignment of the most appropriate health care provider to patient groups and settings is required. This is challenging when skill sets, and scope are confusing to administrators.  Scope changes impact academic programming, regulatory processes and can create confusion and ambiguity for many providers, especially nurses.  Role ambiguity among nurses, unabated by key institutions, contributes to inefficiencies and can be potentially harmful to patients.  Hence, role ambiguity in nursing creates challenges for employers, educators, regulators, and nurses themselves. Historical reports of role ambiguity pertaining to Alberta nurses do exist however the current state is ambiguous, as are the mitigating strategies.  The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the literature that defines role ambiguity, its impact, highlight antecedents and explore the role of key stakeholder institutions best positioned to address the issue in Alberta.