Nursing is the healthcare profession that centers on care that is provided to individuals, communities and families. This healthcare is provided to the aforementioned so that they can experience optimal quality of life as well as health from their conception on to the end of their natural lives.

The work of nurses involves a sizable variety of nursing programs where they either work independently or as an integral part of a team to evaluate, plan, assess and implement certain care. Nursing is a science that is based on a collection of nursing education knowledge that is founded on the contributions of scientists, peer-reviewed journals of a scholarly nature, and evidence-associated practice. As the decades have worn on, technology has left a bigger and bigger impact on nurse jobs to where it is today an important aspect of nursing science.

Better Work Atmosphere

Technology is able to make a better work atmosphere in nursing care; this is dependent on improving quality, safety and the efficiency of the nursing care that is provided. Online nursing programs are increasingly stressing a focus on technology in their courses. Technology in the nursing profession is such that nurses experience both benefits as well as unexpected challenges from the use of this technology in the administration of their duties as healthcare workers, which they may learn about in online LPN programs. Some benefits of technology in the field have been to create a safer environment for the nurses, as they can learn about in online RN programs. It is important that all nurses work with and understand the technology that is available to them because it improves both their lives as well as the lives of those for whom they care.

Workflow Management System

One aspect of technology that has impacted nursing in a significant way is the workflow management system. This workflow management system helps nurses with crucial information like finding the status of lab results or checking the opening of a bed. A workflow management system is a tool that gathers information from many different sources and then integrates it all neatly so that the nurses can see all the relevant information for each day about bed and patient management. The solution that the workflow management system gives nurses allows them to determine which patients may be in danger of falling down, which require special attention due to conditions like heart problems, or which may even have a language barrier. Nurses have to understand a technology system like this so that they are able to prevent errors in data entry, and a good place to learn about this is through an LPN program.

Wireless Patient Monitoring

Another piece of technology that working nurses have benefited from as well as have needed to get used to is wireless patient monitoring. Wireless patient monitoring is a way for nurses to deal with the safety issues that being in charge of patient care brings with it. For instance, common patient safety issues that nurses have to contend with on a regular basis include the threat of patients falling (especially older ones) in hospitals, which may result in bad injuries for the patients or, in the worst cases, even the certitude of death. In the past it was not necessarily possible to keep track of all of the patients hooked up to monitoring equipment, which resulted in nurses not always being able to efficiently react as the patients’ condition took a turn for the worse.

Benefits

These days, however, thanks to advances in nursing technology, which can be studied during an RN program, nurses have a better chance of being able to respond to patient emergencies that much more quickly. It is now a possibility to integrate sensor technology into the patients’ beds, creating the possibility for nurses to monitor vital information like blood pressure, weight, heart rate and perhaps even body movement during sleep. Such sensor technology can be further connected to a communication system that gives off an alert to the nurse when a patient is at risk for falling, or when the heart rate or respiration rate strays outside the normal levels. Hospitals nowadays feature a lot of wireless devices—which can be from hospital staff, patients and visitors alike—that may interfere with the wireless patient monitoring technology. Every effort has to be made to ensure such interferences are eliminated, and good nursing schools will stress this principle.

Error Reduction

Advances in nursing technology help nurses reduce the errors that otherwise may be prevalent as they administer medication to their patients, resulting in a longer nursing career for them. In fact, medication error accounts for one of the most adverse events that can occur in nurse-patient interaction. This menace of error occurring is especially understandable when considering that the management of medication involves various professionals as well as departments within a hospital. To prevent this unlucky incident as much as humanly possible, an electronic administration record along with a barcode reading technology is employed.

Electronic Administration

An electronic administration record and a barcode reading technology are technologies that let nurses record the process of administering medication to the patient. This process can be tracked electronically from the second that the doctor writes the prescription or order to the instant the nurse actually administers the medication to the patient. This technology features a safeguard whereby if an error does end up happening at some point in the administration process, a warning alert will appear, which has the effect of preventing the doctor or the nurse from going ahead and administering the incorrect medication. However, if an error occurred at the very start of the process, such as when the actual medication for the patient was ordered, even this new technology could not detect the error that early on.

Job Overview

Nurses are professionals who have to study hard and gain a lot of work experience to become qualified nurses and move up the ranks in their nursing occupations. They usually also make a good living, and technology has become an increasing factor in a nurse’s career. This means that not only do nurses have to familiarize themselves with technology to do their jobs, but they also have to master it to make sure that it is safely and properly administered or used on their patients. The technology that nurses use covers everything from the simple basics like keeping track of what beds are free to more serious matters like making sure medical mistakes are minimized as much as humanly possible. Technology like this has impacted the field of nursing in a positive way.

To learn more about nursing, see these links.

• Patient Care and Technology
• Improving Nursing via Technology (PDF)
• Nursing Technology Updates
• Technologies that Impacted Nurses
• Technology and Critical Care Nursing
• Technology and Nursing Education (PDF)
• Information Technology and Nursing
• Technology and Human Nursing Care Explored (PDF)
• Nurses Using Technology
• Health Informatics Information