Nursing in The United Kingdom - Non-registered Staff

Non-registered Staff

These staff can be found carrying out a number of roles, attracting various titles such as healthcare assistant (HCA), clinical support worker, care assistant and nursing assistant. These titles all describe workers who work in direct patient care (often on wards), performing tasks such as personal care (washing and dressing), social care (feeding, communicating to patients and generally spending time with them) and more specialised tasks such as recording observations or vital signs (such as temperature, pulse and respiratory rate, or TPR) or measuring and assessing blood pressure, urinalysis, blood glucose monitoring, pressure sores (see waterlow score) and carrying out procedures such as catheterization or cannulation).

Some unregistered staff can work in other roles, for example as phlebotomists (taking blood samples) and ECG technicians (recording electrocardiograms). Others can expand their ward-based role to include these tasks and others. Technically, there are few areas of nursing practice that cannot be legally performed by suitably trained non-registered staff, although they cannot fully replace them, as they legally must be supervised (either directly or indirectly) by a fully qualified registered nurse.