An Introduction
With technology advancement everywhere and digitalization seeping in from all sides, the nursing industry is no exception. Healthcare consumers seek out cutting-edge, digitally driven ways of receiving care, which is again why the NHS is going through a digital transformation. In fact, the NHS Long Term Plan (2019) emphasises how important it is to the future of digitally enabled care and how it will spread throughout the NHS. What does digitalisation exactly mean for nurses? This blog is all about digital nursing in the UK in 2022.
Digital Nursing in the UK
When discussing technology in nursing, we focus on how it can make the profession simpler and more efficient. Did you know that the involved hardware and software frequently save lives, money, and many times, both? It enables nurses, midwives, and other healthcare professionals to spend more time with patients while performing their duties better and safer.
Yes, globally, information technology has impacted nursing. With access to the constant Internet and wireless healthcare technology becoming more and more popular, telehealth has taken center stage in the delivery of healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic did nothing more than hasten the adoption of these technologies and expand their use globally.
NHS and the bigger digital impact
The initiatives to digitise health services are not new. In fact, the UK’s National Programme for Information Technology (NPFIT) was introduced way before in the year 2005. The unified healthcare system known as the National Health Service (NHS) is one such. For years, the NHS has worked to become more technologically savvy, and many of its plans have and continue to have a strong connection to nursing.
The NHS’s Five Year Forward View and the funding it received from the government from 2017 to 2019 aimed to embrace technology in healthcare facilities and “exploit the information revolution.”
The NHS’s Long Term Plan aims to make the NHS paperless, which will, first and foremost, make nurses’ work more efficient. National and local publications, as well as Sustainability and Transformation Plans, emphasise the importance of information and technology in transforming the healthcare system, which begins with nursing. In general, the United Kingdom is a good example of how technology is typically used in nursing, both in its successes and failures.
Advantages of using technology in nursing practise
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have many advantages for both patients and nurses when they are used in healthcare. Uses for digital tools include:
- Support patient-centered care by giving patients more control over their care, increasing access to healthcare, and expanding the ability to reach patients whenever and wherever they choose.
- Enhanced patient monitoring and data that can guide individualised care pathways can be used to deliver high-quality care.
- By providing easy access to information about individual health, nurses and patients can learn more.
- Reduce the amount of time spent sorting through paperwork to improve the efficiency of care.
- By having quick access to medication information, streamlining handoffs, and providing e-prescriptions, errors can be reduced.
The role technology plays in nursing
In the United Kingdom, the Queen Nursing Institute (QNI) works to ensure that nurses, managers, and policymakers provide high-quality nursing care to everyone in their homes and communities. They asked nurses to describe how they use technology in their professional roles for their Nursing in the Digital Age report, which was based on a survey of 534 community health professionals. The responses they received were
- virtual learning
- caseload management
- data capture
- social media
- virtual ward
- telephone triage, and others.
Nurses generally agreed that using digital technology improves nursing practise and education. They used IT to make it easier to communicate with their patients and to provide care, support, and education. They also used technology to communicate with other medical professionals (organize conference calls, etc.). Electronic prescribing, virtual consultations, data collection, updating patient records, referring patients to specialist services, diagnostic tools, remote monitoring, and other uses of digital technology were mentioned by survey respondents. Let’s discuss some of the ways below.
1.Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
ICT incorporates various technologies that are involved in ensuring seamless communication among health professionals, as well as simplifying and improving clinical workflow. ICT aids in the delivery of healthcare. They alter how nurses plan, deliver, document, and review clinical care, simplifying communication with health professionals, patients, and their families, and allowing nurses to make clinical decisions and review diagnoses as needed. Some of the examples include Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Computerized Decision Support Systems (CDSS), Telecare, Particular Apps, etc.
2.Technologies based on robots
Assistive robots and assistive social robots are examples of robotic technologies, with the latter capable of social interaction with patients. Therapeutic robots, telepresence robots, service robots, and socially interactive robots are the four types of assistive social robots. They take on more complex tasks that nurses are frequently responsible for. This category still sees a lot of research and testing.
3.Sensor and monitoring solutions
Nurses can care for their patients remotely thanks to remote monitoring and sensor solutions. There are a lot of settings that include medical sensors, wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs), computer hardware, computer networks, software applications, and databases that exchange a wide range of health information. There are, however, less complex wireless technologies in healthcare that detect behavioural patterns or track a specific health metric, such as blood glucose levels.
4.Telehealth
Telehealth has been growing in popularity as a method of delivering information and treatment, and its use skyrocketed when the pandemic struck the UK, as it did the rest of the world.
Telehealth is a standard tool for nurses who monitor and coach patients with chronic diseases daily. According to BMJ research, this practise has contributed to fewer emergency room visits.
5.Virtual Reality (VR)
Virtual reality is a rapidly expanding and highly effective method of pain management. Pain is mostly managed with medications in hospital settings. However, nurses frequently have to stop dispensing medications in order to spend their valuable time consoling and distracting patients in pain. While virtual reality cannot provide human contact, it can certainly provide distraction. Numerous studies have shown that virtual reality can help with pain management in hospitals.
6.eLearning
The delivery of medical education has changed as a result of remote learning opportunities. It became much simpler to acquire new knowledge, advance one’s credentials, and keep up with medical news.
The top ten suggestions for involving nurses in digital technology
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- Get the basics right; if nurses are hampered by outdated hardware and poor connectivity, they won’t embrace digital technology. Insufficient technology forces nurses to use paper again and results in work duplication.
- Provide adequate funding for the digitization of services, which means that you should support this innovation long after it has been developed and launched.
- Invest in digital education and training while considering staffing levels. Nurses may not have the time to learn new systems due to a lack of staffing.
- Ensure that nurses are involved in the very beginning stages of the development of new technologies.
- Only request information from nurses that will be useful to them and their patients. Allow them to analyse and utilise the gathered data by providing feedback and enabling them to do so.
- Make sure the systems are appropriate for the staff who will use them and suitable for the workplace. Particular systems should be created for personnel who work in community settings.
- To ensure that new services, such as video consultations, are appropriate for patients, including patients in technological innovations and risk assessment initiatives. If nurses believe patients are unhappy or there will be negative effects, they may be resistant to new working methods.
- Make every effort to ensure that new technologies give staff members more time to care for patients and foster deeper interactions with them.
- Whenever possible, make sure that new technologies give staff members more time to care for patients, enhancing rather than obstructing their interactions with them.
- Give nurses the chance to create and implement local and national digital health policies.
The hereafter of nursing in the digital age
One of the most important aspects of integrating technology into healthcare is preparing future nurses as well as current nurses for roles that are becoming more and more digitally oriented. There are initiatives that campaign with a goal to transform every nurse into an electronic nurse by the year 2020, with a particular emphasis on e-nursing training for wearable technology, mobile health, data security, and patient bedside technology.
Our locum recruitment agency, JP Medicals Recruitment is staffed by a highly experienced team of nurses who are digitally strong and are from diverse backgrounds. Our experienced digital nursing staff provide a wide range of services and work alongside our clinical support workers to assess and treat each client on an individual basis. If you would like to join our team, contact us.
