TECH-NURSING

By KIRAN ALI

Information technology (IT) has great impact on human lives. It has made people life easier. Technology made it possible to extract updated information on our fingertips anytime, anywhere. In today’s world IT become an essential part of every industry whether it is commercial or services industry. In the services industry, health care (nursing) is also being impacted by technological changes. In today's Information Age, nurses are expected to keep pace with the rapidly advancing technology and Information and Communication technology becomes an integral part of health-care practice. Patients are the customers of health care facility; it is the responsibility of health care professionals to satisfy their needs and that can only be attained by providing quality care to them. Quality care can be provided by giving proper health education to the patients and by maintaining privacy, confidentiality, and safety of the patients. IT is one way which gives the opportunity to health care professionals especially nurses to provide quality and safe care to their patients. As nurses spend more time with the patients than other health care professionals so IT helps them in achieving this goal. Use of IT in health care setting helps nurses in providing safe care to their patients. Patient safety is improved by reducing medication error, by sharing health information among health care professional and by updating recent knowledge about different diseases.

Patient safety is foremost in nursing profession and it is enhanced by reducing medication error and that become possible through IT. Institute of Medicine has designed a report in 2000 which estimates that 7,391 deaths resulted from medication errors each year in United States and according to report medication errors occur in nearly 1 of every 5 doses given to patients in the typical hospital. In order to reduce the death rate, health care professionals should lessen the incident of medication error. In this way they will be able to provide safe and quality care to their patients. IT plays an important role in reducing medication error. As the medication orders are computerized, no one can change the physician’s order and the orders are clearly written so there are less chances of medication error. Whereas, in past when there was no IT medication orders were written manually. There were high chances of incidence of medication error because sometimes hand writing was not understandable to the nurses. IT has solved this problem by decreasing the incidences of medication error.

Safe and quality care is also provided by sharing health information of the patient among health care professionals. Health information is shared easily among all health care providers with the help of IT. The sharing of information within health care professionals i.e. doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, pharmacists, dieticians are important to provide continuous care to the patients and alll the health records of the patient are available in computer with an easy access. For example, if there is an abnormality in lab reports, through IT this information is easily conveyed to the doctors and nurses and treatment will be carried out accordingly. Besides that, pharmacists can suggest the doctors to adjust the doses of medication. In addition, dietician can also give their suggestions about the preferred diet accordingly. Another example is that, if patient is shifted from one department to another, the health care professionals of that department will get complete information about the patient and it helps in providing continuous and safe care to the patient.

Patients will also receive safe and quality care if nurses are well equipped with recent and relevant information about diseases. IT helps nurses in updating the knowledge regarding different diseases and their treatments by reading recent online web and journal articles. As medication error put patient and nurses in trouble, knowledge error can also create problem to patient as well as to nurses. For this reason, nurses should keep themselves updated with the updated information about health and health issues. Nurses play an important role in caring and educating patient as well as their families so it is essential for nurses to have an appropriate and in depth knowledge about health and diseases. As knowledge works in this technological age, it is essential that nurses have access to the latest information at their fingertips. As a human being, it is difficult to remember each and everything so IT enabled, nurses to do difficult task in an easy manner. IT provides an opportunity to search different internet websites for health and health issues within minutes. Moreover, nurses increases and updates their knowledge by reading recent online articles from these websites anytime anywhere. In this way, nurses will develop their professional growth. In addition, intranet can be developed within the organization to have an easy access to the policies, protocols and procedures. Knowledge can be updated by reading books and journal articles. Policies, protocols and procedures can be retrieved through files but nowadays people are so fond of computer technology that they want all the things to be done with the help of this technology. They prefer searching through internet rather reading books and files because it saves time as well as energy.

In summary, IT has a great impact on nursing and health care setting. It gives a way to nurses to provide safe and quality care to the patient in a complex clinical environment. The Institute of Medicine's "Crossing the Quality Chasm" report (2003) calls for the infusion of information technology into today's healthcare curricula, reasoning that IT tools are essential to safe, high-quality care in today's complex clinical environments. IT helps nurses in improving safety of the patient by reducing medication error, by sharing health information among health care professionals and by updating knowledge about different diseases and their treatment. Keeping in mind the uses of IT, it is suggested that IT should be introduced in all health care setting to improve patient safety and provide quality care to them. In addition, nurses should be trained about the correct use of IT. If nurses don’t know how to operate the system, it would be difficult for them to fulfill their responsibility. So it is important for the management of the health care setting to arrange short course of IT for their employees. Furthermore, IT course should be introduced in nursing curriculum.