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At the Australian College of Nursing's recent National Nursing Forum, assistant director of clinical services at Cairns Day Surgery, Sharon Downman, spoke about nursing informatics and why it is important to nurses.
While the concept isn’t new, it has resurfaced within the health sphere.
Nursing informatics is a speciality that integrates nursing science, computer science and information science to manage and communicate data, information and knowledge in nursing practice.
Downman said nursing informatics facilitates the integration of data and information to support patients, nurses and other providers in their decision making.
She added there has been a resurgence in the importance of the specialty in recent years, with the introduction of electronic health records across the nation.
“More recently in Australia we have seen attempts to bring nursing informatics to the fore and develop prioritised actions to ensure all nurses have the skills and knowledge to undertake nursing informatics activities at a range of levels,” Downman said. "Healthcare is an information intensive environment and data helps us at our bedside to put evidence-based care in the hands of nurses at the point of care.
“It’s the way of the future – we shouldn’t not just keep up but be ahead,” she said.
Nursing Review spoke with Downman to find out more.
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Thank you for this topic/article. Nursing Informatics (NI) is certainly upon us more than ever. A few comments I had are as follows: What does this mean? “develop prioritised actions to ensure all nurses have the skills and knowledge to undertake nursing informatics activities at a range of levels,”
Nurses are a wealth of information. If and when nurses undertake NI activities, they will be helping (by using/applying this knowledge) an NI specialist analyse information requirements; design, implement and evaluate information systems and data structures that support nursing; and applying computer technologies for nursing (ANA Council on Computer Applications in Nursing. Congress of Nursing Practice unpublished report, 1992).
“Healthcare is an information intensive environment and data helps us at our bedside to put evidence-based care in the hands of nurses at the point of care.” Rather, healthcare is a data rich environment and the information we are able to glean from it (information processing) reinforces and provides evidence-based care in the hands of nurses.
Just as nursing continues to evolve, so will the role of NI.