How Has Nursing Informatics Education HelpedIt was somewhere in the 1980s that the field of nursing informatics education received due emphasis and recognition in the US and integration in various different nursing course curriculum there. This integration then began to be perceived as an important component in preparing student nurses towards their future role of efficient and time-saving management of patient health records. Till then, records management in the health care industry was almost totally dependent on the efficiency of individual nurses in manually compiling and processing them. The realization of the time-saving utilization of nursing human resources through the use of computers and information science was very much felt at that time. It opened the gates for the entry of the multidisciplinary and interlinked areas of computer hardware and software into teaching nursing to students. Moreover, the teaching of information science and practical use of computers to student nurses focused on how it could enable them to do their own nursing job easily, efficiently, and timely. Since then, nursing informatics education has indeed come a long way and it has now pervaded almost the entire range of nursing roles in the US. Today we see nurses involved in software development for patient care management. Some of them are involved in the management of hospital inventories and medicine distribution to patients in hospitals through the use of computers. Some of them even oversee the computer server administration in many hospitals in the US. Others are involved in computerized billing, patient admissions, and discharge related record keeping in hospitals. Yet others are involved in administering health databases. A byproduct of the above integration was the immediate quantum increase in the scope of the career growth of informatics educated nurses, especially in that of a Registered Nurse (RN). RNs, who did courses in nursing informatics, could get roles as nursing instructors in online teaching of nursing to students. They could alternatively get a role as a data analyst in US hospitals. They could also bag jobs in the computerized administration of patient health records in nursing homes. The number of vacancies for nurses proficient in their nursing roles and who also knew a bit of computer applications have skyrocketed today. An important aspect of the computer science infused nursing education has been the perception that nurses can do a much better job of software development in hospitals rather than IT experts who know almost nothing about nursing. Moreover, computer science both in hardware and software and information science too have undergone mindboggling evolutionary changes over the years. So, informatics educated nurses involved in the computerized administration of health records have had to update themselves constantly to the changes. This has admittedly not been easy. But, hats off to nurses as a class as they have taken informatics education as a challenge to be met. A majority of nurses are women. Their role in nursing is already so vast and difficult. So, their having succeeded in nursing informatics education is as much a tribute to gender equality as an appreciation of the capabilities of women in general. |