Great opportunity to use technology in nursing

Writing in a new Queen’s Nursing Institute report, NHS Digital Chief Nurse Anne Cooper has said that the NHS is on the cusp of a great opportunity to use technology to accelerate the contribution community nurses make to patient care.

Writing the foreword to Nursing in the Digital Age – Using Technology to Support Patients at Home, Cooper said that ‘we need data and system standards for community nursing’ that will further ‘enable consistent approaches to the recording, coding, entry and viewing of information’. Cooper also stressed that there is a ‘need to focus on culture changes to see the real integration of technology and data into nursing practice’.

The report, based on a survey of over 500 nurses working in the community, was published at QNI conference on 23 April. The paper seeks to determine how far new healthcare information technology has changed in the previous six years and how skills and attitudes within community services have adapted.

‘Nursing in the Digital Age’ discovered that there are at least 67 differently named IT systems currently being used in community healthcare, with 74 per cent of community nurses finding IT systems a more reliable way of working, compared to paper. However, 29 per cent of community nurses are still working largely with paper based systems and 41 per cent of NHS trusts do not use telehealth systems.

Crystal Oldman, the QNI’s chief executive, commented: “Community nurses demonstrate a general confidence in and acceptance of new IT systems that support efficient working and patient care. However, they also highlight in stark detail the challenges that frontline practitioners experience with systems that are complex and which require high quality support from IT departments. In some areas practitioners are frustrated by barriers to new technology, such as incompatible software systems and poor connectivity.

“When managed well, good IT systems should enable nurses to spend more time giving direct patient facing care. However, when problems do arise, community nurses are concerned that they spend more time managing the demands of IT systems rather than the pressing needs of their patients, families, carers and communities.”