How informatics has altered nursing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

How informatics has altered nursing - Essay Example 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 M cCormick (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 â€Å"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 f act, 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’