The Best Quality of Healthy Families and Communities - Essay Example

?Running Head: Informatics and Nursing How Informatics Has Changed Nursing Introduction As defined by Grammaticos and Diamantis (2008), nursing as a profession is one that focuses on the care of individuals, families and communities with the intent of helping them maintain the best quality of health as possible all throughout their lives, while the related concept of nursing science is an ever-expanding body of knowledge from which nurses draw their skills and expertise. The highly dynamic and ever-changing nature of the nursing profession can never be disputed, nor can it be denied that patients have special needs which must constantly be monitored and are constantly changing. From here, it should follow that to care for a patient in this day and age has become much more difficult and challenging that it has already been. Additionally nurses, while already known in general for having a wide range of skills and competencies, must thus be able to adapt and learn newer skill sets in order to better discharge their duties. All in all, that more and more people in hospitals require intensive care from nurses means that there is an equally dire need for the succeeding generations of nurses to be as competent as they possibly can be. Taking all these things into account, it should not be surprising that nursing as a profession has become highly in-demand, or that nursing has and will forever be changing to adapt with the times – thanks in part to the existence of nursing informatics. It is for this reason that nurses have always been able to reinforce their practices with a constant flow of newer knowledge – which, in this day and age, is something that they will definitely need more than ever before. Nursing Informatics – Past/Present/Future Trends, Benefits of Such Practices Saba and McCormick (2001) have defined healthcare informatics in general as the integration of the branches of health, computer, information and cognitive sciences in managing healthcare information. Nursing informatics is one of its three subtypes – the other two being health and medical informatics, respectively – and is in turn defined by Hannah et al (1985) as how nurses make use of information technology in carrying out their daily duties. And this definition, too, was further expanded by Graves and Corcoran (1989) as “a combination of computer science, information science and nursing science designed to assist in the management and processing of nursing data, information and knowledge to support the practice of nursing and the delivery of nursing care” (p. 227). There can be little doubt that it is thanks to this particular branch of healthcare informatics that nurses have always been able to maintain a certain level of quality when it comes to their work; in fact, as stated by Curran (2003), it is absolutely essential that nurses and clinicians alike have some degree of competence here so that they will continue to maintain their competence and the quality of the healthcare they administer. Ball (2003) helps provide an overview of the evolution of nursing informatics. Even as early as the mid-80s, nurses could make use of the then-existing laptop computers during seminars, but today these laptops have become accessible even up to the patient’s bedside. And despite the existence of laptops then, their steep price made them too expensive to be commonplace in hospitals – or anywhere else, for that matter. Typewriters had the advantage of being much less costly, and much easier to use, but the cost of correction fluid could get to be a headache at times – much more so for those nurses who happened to make lots of mistakes while working. However, for the longest time, most nurses – that is, those who neither owned computers nor could afford to spend on them – had to deal with these potentially cumbersome contraptions. This being the case, the advent of computer technology has been a definite godsend. Where a few years ago, a nurse would have to jot down every single detail on a particular patient’s physiological data such as his vital signs, today it has become much easier for nurses to keep track of the condition of their patients. There can be little doubt, then, that computers have made the work of nurses a great deal easier. However, even the way computers are being used now is but a small sample of the potential they hold for the nursing profession in particular, especially when it comes to nursing informatics. Ball (2003) refers to such a phenomenon as the integration stage of substitution. When the nursing industry first got its hands on computers, the first thing they did was, understandably, to make use of them to try and make it easier for nurses to perform the tasks they had hitherto been carrying out on a daily basis, such as typing out reports and paperwork in general. Following substitution is innovation. Using the new technology, one attempts to do things previously thought impossible. For instance, computers have become commonplace all throughout the healthcare sector, such as in clinical laboratories, pharmacies and other large-scale health information systems – however, this is yet to be the case in the field of nursing. Finally, the stage of transformation is one in which technology completely revolutionizes the field in question – which, in the healthcare sector, currently only applies to the field of radiology. Considering how the ever-rigorous demands of a nursing job has prompted countless nurses to leave the profession, anything that could help make their tasks easier would be an immense help indeed. As reported by Buerhaus, Staiger and Auerbach (2000), the nursing shortage currently plaguing the industry today will only get worse – as opposed to previous cases in which the shortage abated before too much damage had been done. Their study made note of certain interesting facts and made some predictions, such as how the average age of registered nurses in 1998 was 41.9 – a full 4.5 years older than they were 15 years ago – and how this average age was expected to be 45.4 years old by 2010. Additionally, the number of registered nurses at the time of the study was said to be 35% less than it was 20 years before. Such findings are only corroborated by Bednash (2000), who noted that the number of enrollees in BS Nursing courses all over America had dropped by 2.1% compared to the previous year, and that 2000 was the 6th year in a row in which enrollment rates had fallen. Their study also discovered how, from 52.9% in 1980, only 31.7% of America’s registered nurses as of the year 2000 were under 40 years of age. In a nutshell, what this means is that America has had less and less professionals apply to become registered nurses, and that such a scenario can be predicted to last for some time. In short, within the next 2 decades, there will not be enough registered nurses to care for all the patients currently residing in American hospitals. And while improved salary and benefits may help for a while, eventually even these will fail to provide a lasting solution. Such a crisis tends to result not only in a significantly smaller population of nurses, but also one that is not quite as well-trained or confident in its abilities. Both lack of training and confidence are very likely to result in mistakes, which could be fatal – this is literally true in the healthcare sector, and doubly so when it comes to nursing, where for instance, giving a patient an excessive dose of medicine could quite literally kill him. This is in fact where 40% of all medication errors occur, and such errors are also highly responsible for causing patient deaths that could have otherwise been avoided. Given such circumstances, the pressure and scrutiny nurses are placed under with regard to medication safety should no longer be a surprise (Institute of Medicine, 1999). Meadows (2002) gives a relatively simple suggestion as to how to fix this problem, one that involves clinical information systems. These are extremely helpful in granting nurses greater flexibility, allowing them to spend less time and effort documenting things in favor of actually being there for patients more often, and to actually feel confident that they are providing adequate if not decent healthcare. Ideally, such a system would be able to adapt information to fit an acute-care clinical workflow, and in such a way that it can be accessed whenever needed. This should then have the effect of making clinicians much more confident in their capabilities, reducing errors and further ensuring that they comply with the necessary guidelines and policies. Other, more specific benefits are also attainable with the use of such a system. For one thing, it becomes possible to use point-of-care clinical documentation systems, which helps document the care provided by nurses exactly at the moment they are doing it – extremely helpful, considering how documentation has always required that nurses remember what they did during the whole process. This also has the added benefit of making it easier for nurses to provide care, since the system can also relay that particular patient’s medical records, as well as for facilitating communications between nurses. All in all, they are also better able to exercise proper medication administration, as the existence of such systems makes the whole process much easier and much less prone to error. Conclusion In order, the succeeding pages served to give brief definitions for the nursing profession as a whole, and then on the specific concepts of healthcare and nursing informatics. Different nursing trends over the years were discussed in the immediately preceding section, in part to determine what has already been achieved and what still remains to be done. And finally, the most desirable course of action to further advance this particular facet of the nursing profession was explained and elaborated upon. References Ball, M.J. (2000). Nursing informatics: where caring and technology meet. Springer, 7-8 Bednash, G. (2000). Commentary: The decreasing supply of registered nurses: Inevitable future or call to action? [Electronic version]. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 283(22). Buerhaus, P.I., Staiger, D.O., & Auerbach, D.I. (2000). Implications of a rapidly aging registered nurse workforce. The Journal of the American Medical Association, 283(22), 2948-2954. Curran, C.R. (2003) Informatics Competencies for Nurse Practitioners. AACN Clinical Issues: Advanced Practice in Acute & Critical Care, 14(3), 320-330. Grammaticos, P.C. and Diamantis, A. (2008). Useful known and unknown views of the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates and his teacher Democritus. Hellenic Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 11(1), 2–4. Graves, J.R. and Corcoran, S. (1989) The study of nursing informatics. Image Journal of Nursing Schools, Winter, 21(4), 227–31 Hannah, K.J., Guillemin, E.J. and Conklin, D.N. (1985) Nursing uses of computer and information science. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science. Institute of Medicine. (1999). To err is human: Building a safer health system. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Meadows, G. (2002). The nursing shortage: Can information technology help?. Nursing Economics. Retrieved on March 13, 2011 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FSW/is_1_20/ai_n18613248/ Saba, V.K. and McCormick, K.A. (2001). Essentials of computers for nursing: informatics for the new millennium. 3rd ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Read More