Task shifting: A high-level analysis of scholarship

Background – With changing patterns of disease and significant demographic shifts governments and the nursing profession is having to examine how services can be delivered to pursue and deliver universal health coverage. Consequently, there has been considerable discussions on task shifting, sharing and delegation.
Methods - This study examines the corpus of indexed literature on the subject of task shifting through a mixed-method bibliographic analysis of the scholarship contributions of both the medical and nursing professions. Bibliometrics is used to identify underlying thematic structures of the research underpinning the topic, providing information on the most prolific authors, illuminating connections between peers, and mapping the general themes that have been investigated, and how they change over time.
Interpretation – A total of 1,833 unique papers contributed to the corpus of literature with increased rates of scholarship on the topic being associated with the publication of the declaration of Alma Ata and the World Health report of 2006. Scholarship on the topic is widely dispersed globally and illustrates that groups of authors regularly collaborate on the application of task shifting to populations/groups both disease and condition oriented, various human resources for health and care intervention reform, underpinning regulatory changes and, the pursuit of universal health coverage. Up until this point, the work on task shifting has given only limited consideration to the use of technology as a means of generating more comprehensive solution sets. The need to include technology solutions as part and parcel of future research studies should be pursued.