Nursing Informatics Education Essay

Nursing

Health information technology is information technology that is used in the health care setting. Technological advances and government regulation have combined to create a dramatic increase in the use of information technology across all fields, and health care is starting to come on board now as well. So important is health informatics that a new C-suite position is emerging, the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, or CNIO (Murphy, 2011). This paper will look at health informatics, and how it relates to my field which is education and training within the nursing field. Murphy notes that informatics nurses no longer see finances as a significant barrier to their ability to progress, but that there remains work to be done in the field with respect to integrating different types of information technology. This is one of the many roles that nursing informatics professional play with in the industry.

Background

My main interest is nursing education and training, but within this field there are disagreements about the best practices and methods. For example, I favor training via boot camps, which are intensive bursts of training intended to immerse candidates in a subject matter in order to build their expertise. Others believe that the learning and training process is ongoing. While this is true, I would also argue that boot camps supplement the daily training, and move people forward more quickly. Their structure alone makes them a valuable tool.. However the training process is undertaken, enhancing the capabilities of nursing informatics professionals is an important role in today's health care environment, with its emphasis on enhancing the role of information systems in health care delivery.

Nursing Informatics Education

One of the things that I am thinking is that nursing education needs to evolve at a much quicker pace. I have noticed that nursing education is still challenged by ideas like using information technology, and evidence-based practice like using medical knowledge in the field of nursing. These are things that should have been an integral part of nursing education and nursing practice a long time ago. Thus, there are elements of nursing education curriculum that serve little purpose in today's world and should be overhauled (Hannah, Ball & Edwards, 1994).

McNeil and Odom (2000) propose that undergraduate education in nursing should be more inclusive of information technology. This is important because HIT is one of the key drivers of change in the profession in the 21st century. As a future nursing educator, I believe that today's nurses will benefit for immediate immersion in this high-tech environment. Murphy (2011) notes that while finances are no longer a major barrier to nursing education, that there are still barriers with respect to the integration of different nursing informatics technologies, and this makes for challenges in integrating these technologies between the classroom, practicum education and the field. Creating this linkages is an important part of curriculum development and something that should also be important with respect to training on the job.

This is where I feel that the boot camp model is more successful. It is difficult to learn technologies. Learning them piecemeal is a challenge in the middle of a busy shift, but when time is taken to fully immerse in a new technology, with instructors and peers for support, the learning process can be condensed. The nurses can leave the boot camp with sufficient knowledge to work with the technology in the field, and then at that point the process of ongoing learning can take places as the nurses refine their skills with HIT and nursing informatics.

Deficiencies

One of the most significant barriers to the further education of nurses in HIT…