My Nursing Informatics

Since the beginning of the profession, nurses have applied their ingenuity, resourcefulness, and professional awareness of what works to adapt technology and objects to support nursing care, usually with the intent to promote efficiency but also client comfort and healing.

-June Kaminski

As I prepare myself to teach nurses and student nurses it is my obligation to develop my own knowledge, skills, and attitudes concerning healthcare informatics and its’ relation to patient safety and quality of care. It is important for educators to prepare themselves with the ever-changing technology within the healthcare system. By doing this educators will be more prepared to help their students. In taking the nursing informatics self-assessment test I learned that I am comfortable with technology and am more toward the innovator level. I am willing to use technology to help teach students and I am not afraid of trying something new even if it takes extra time to learn a new skill. Overall, the importance of technology in nursing is the endless resources that students can utilize when presenting work or the complex medical charting system that will help students gain an overall picture of their health. The goal of technology especially within medical records is to see a multidisciplinary approach that all healthcare providers view to see theirs patient’s progress.

The largest component of information technology is improving our overall goal for patient safety. Many resources are available to help healthcare providers to manage their patients; therefore it is important to teach nurses how to use these many resources. For example hospitals access different guides to help nurses understand different medications, compatibility and medication management. Encouraging nurses to use these resources help reduce error and promote safety before administering multiple medications. Despite the negativity on the occasional computer crashing, these resources are always available and since most documentation if completed online, nurses have many different tools readily available. June Kaminsky is a great author who talks about nursing informatics and how it affects overall, nursing care. I like how she discusses how nursing has not changed, bt our tools have advanced to improve patient outcomes. We must be positive about these changes and become experts in new technology in order to improve the outcomes of our students and  the care they deliver.