Introduction
The healthcare system is undergoing a lot of changes in recent times. There are changing roles of the nurses in care and delivery of services. Nurses are more educated and advanced than the old times where their roles were limited to a narrow scope. There is a need for the nurses to deal with change in a positive way. It must be noted that each change comes with resistance from the workforce but the mangers must apply the best ways to overcome the resistance. There is a lot of changes in the nursing field including: online documentation, staff scheduling rotations, shift change, using arm band coding for administration of medical services and the use of information technology in nursing.
The changes introduced aims at improving the effectiveness and efficiencies in service delivery. The changing roles of nurses come with challenges of lack of enough staff and the tight budgets of health institutions. Nurses are held with responsibilities that are daily developing on a wider range. The health care system handles a lot of complicated diseases including asthma, cancer, obesity, allergies, HIV/AIDS, notifiable diseases and many others. There arises a need for advanced education for nurses so that they are fully empowered to be in the frontline of accepting change with minimal resistance.
Among the changing roles of nurses include: offers TED talks, publishes scientific research, develop mobile medical applications, apply use of technology and address the healthcare policy. Due to the changing roles, nurses must establish effective collaborations with all the involved stakeholders in the healthcare sector. It is said that,” change is the only thing that is permanent,” and it is caused by legislations, the policy reforms, advanced technology and lack of enough staff in the healthcare system.
Technology in nursing
Advanced healthcare technology has been introduced in the nursing field creating a lot of opportunities and changing their roles. A lot of their tasks has transformed to electronic: x-rays, test results and medication ordering. Nurses have become digitally ambitious because of the introduction of mobile devices, cloud computing, use of electronic medical records and teleconferencing. The field of nursing is thus growing to be broader and deeper. There are areas where the use of cloud computing in health information databases helps the nurses to research more about the spread of HIV/AIDS. The medical gadgets that are used in treatment of patient are becoming smarter. An example is seen in the newly developed bandages for patients with heart diseases which are built-in sensors to determine the vital signs.
The emergence of nursing informatics gives the nurses the chance to rely with technology developers so that the electronic records system can be user friendly. The nurses with the help of technology can also treat the patient at home by the help of monitoring programs supported by live webcasts or teleconferencing. The nurses can communicate directly with the patient and offer the procedures and the guidelines that will lead to the recovery state of the ill before their cases becomes complicated. This is a method that serves as a great tool in service delivery in the healthcare system. The behavior of patient also evolves towards a digital world where they utilize the online resources for medical research and treatment of symptoms. Therefore nurses are placed in a position that they have to train as health technology technicians so that they can direct the patients to websites that are trusted.
The new and advanced technology do not discriminate traditional healthcare systems but it opens up the options to educate patients about their health. The list of use of technology in nursing continues to grow. The hospitals can use the mobile apparatus to address a patient about a particular problem. The use of geographical positioning system (GPS) helps nurses to trace the patients with dementia. The use of telemedicine helps the rural households to connect with nurse specialists in advocating for care and delivery of services. The use of social media will promote effective communication and collaboration to the nurses that embraces social media.
Since use of technology is now a requirement to all nurses, they must be familiar with the following tips: they must select a web based system that guarantee easy access, test the equipment beforehand and have a contingency plan, archive events where technology have been used in remote meetings and create and save lists when sending out e-mails to groups. Health information technology ensure free and easy access of information and it must ensure of avoiding unauthorized access to patient information, improving patient safety, enable efficacy and guarantee the quality of health services and care. The government has shown efforts of supporting implementation of electronic health system so that the productivity of healthcare professional can be increased. The nurses are in a position to exchange information about the diagnosis procedures, care and treatment of patients from all departments through the application and use of electronic health systems. This is another reason for the changing roles of nurses.
There are Medicare and Medicaid electronic health records programs that outline goals, objectives and measures that describe how nurses will use the system to improve the care of patients and delivery of services. The measures must be included in CPOE, medication supervision, and education of the patients to make them aware of the introduced systems. Another role due to the application of technology is that nurses are developing more skills in the gathering of health demographic information about the patient. They only have to visit the electronic system and take the demographic data that was captured by the heath information personnel.
The Electronic Medication Administration records and CPOE are currently replacing traditional manual transcription which was commonly done by nurses. The implication can improve health care quality and patient safety; this because errors that are encountered in prescription are eliminated or minimized, reduces nurse frustration when she is not in a position to read the unreadable written orders. Therefore, nurses are certain of the medication and transcription that they are administering to their patients.
The introduction of bar code as technology in medical administration has assisted in avoiding of errors involved in medication by enhancing double checking medication through scanning before administration. The system verifies the patients’ medication and wristbands which enhances accuracy in terms of medication administration. The bar code technology provides an extra safety to administering of medication that was not accessible prior to the backup of EHRs.
The Electronic Documentation system provides nurses with the capacity to record and document the care they offer. This creates efficiency and easy retrieval of documents reducing the congestion that was involved in traditional hospital. There is an emergency of technology that assists in import of bedside monitoring mechanisms in the HER which allows only nurse verification instead of nurse offering transcriptions.
However, the introduction of EHRs in the health care would result into particular challenges to the nurses concerning conflict beside improved quality and efficiency linked to EHRs. Although the system is expected to streamline nurses services there is possibility that this technology could compromise safety of the patient where nurses are not sufficiently trained and educated about the system. Therefore, nurses should be aware of the new errors developed by the system which are not the same as those developed by paper chart system.
In Conclusion the importance of nurse engagement in the use of technology is evident. Nurses are the only professionals that spend most of the time with the patients. Due to this, they create an opportunity to enhance the implementation of the EHR systems and use of technology in the other interrelated fields. The use of the electronic records system has helped nurses in doing evident research based on the captured information. Nursing informatics has also introduced new roles of the nurses: decision making, giving advice and act as super users of the systems. Nurses have also ensured that there are regulations that govern the use of technology so that they can eliminate the risks associated with litigation. The application of technology in nursing must be well implemented and must be in accordance with the regulatory compliance of the laws. The success of the technology implementation will depend on whether the nurses will give their views in the process of planning and development and this warranty patient safety and friendly usability of the advanced system.
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