Ross, Michele Alessa Stankes.

This study's purpose was to explore, through a descriptive method, the registered nurses' experience of being assisted in practice by multiskilled personnel for the provision of direct patient care. The multiskilled personnel were unlicensed, functioned in an assistive role to the nurse, and were trained at the hospital to perform technical direct patient care tasks. Data sources included interviews with three registered nurses. Study findings supported the existence of a caring nurse-multiskilled assistant relationship that was characterized by the concepts of communication, task responsibility, reciprocal helping, respect, commitment to a shared goal, and nurse leadership. Through a dialectical process, where the thesis was the nurse-patient relationship as identified in the study and the antithesis was the multiskilled assistant-patient relationship, the nurse-multiskilled assistant-patient relationship was synthesized. The study findings in relationship to previous studies, team theory, and Nursing as Caring theory were discussed.