Sample Nursing Paper on Current strategies to implement informatics into the nursing curriculum: An integrative review
Discussion: Nursing
Discussion 1
Nurse educators face many challenges in preparing learners to confront the rising complexities of the work setting. The current expanded use of information systems and computers implore all healthcare workers, mostly nurses to interface with multiple technological sources to help them care for patients. Hence, nursing educators assume different approaches to teach informatics and application of evidence-based practice to support decision making and the input and retrieval of pertinent patient data. One approach nurse educators can use when designing courses for nurse informatics entails developing the baseline informatics competencies of nursing learners (Hebda et al., 2019). This development may entail the use of computer-generated and computer-graded assessment tools that will provide immediate feedback upon completing assessments and using the outcomes to design what informatics strategies to incorporate in the curriculum and the necessary resources to develop learners’ competencies. Instructors can integrate four major content areas in the curriculum comprising professional responsibility, leadership and management, care delivery, and community nursing.
Another valuable strategy for teaching informatics includes introducing a case scenarios to student’s freshman year that increasingly become difficult over the course of learners’ education. Health informatics instructors should focus on utilizing Knowledge Skills and Attitudes (KSAs framework), which was identified by Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (SQEN) for organizing specific content on informatics (Hebda et al., 2019). Further, when teaching informatics to graduate students, one strategy instructors can utilize is emphasizing access and extraction of information from clinical data sets and identifying valuable resources to facilitate ethical decision making when using educational material and computing. This model reflects the use of data in practice. Nonetheless, using language specific to informatics into the course helps to make it more explicit to ensure that activities associated with the outcomes are effected.
Discussion 2
The American Nursing Informatics Association approved a position statement confirming its support and a framework for sorting the complexities associated with electronic health record documentation. The white paper affirms its support for the safe use of electronic health records including the incorporation of HER safety programs comprising a multi-disciplinary self-assessments. The white paper statement champions for the application of standardized terms to report patient safety concerns related with EHRs and incorporating those terms into the event-reporting systems (HIMSS, 2020). In this context, nursing informaticians ensure the incorporation and delivery of professional standards and contemporary scope of practice requirements within all clinical information systems. Thus, nurses must accomplish the ethical and professional standards of practice and foster collaborative and inclusive patients’ role when making healthcare decisions and patient information management.
Health sciences students and practitioners including informatics share a vital obligation of exploring the moral principles and ethical challenges associated with research and practice. Ethical matters in health informatics are generally less profound although some of them are persistent concerns over several decades. A major concern for health informatics is confidentiality of electronically stored patient information(HIMSS, 2020). Although confidentiality and privacy are of vital significance, the field is awash with ethical issues such as the appropriate selection and use of informatics tools in various clinical setting, determination of who should use such tools, the impact of system evaluation, and use of computers to track clinical outcomes to guide future practice. Nursing professionals can overcome the challenges of privacy and confidentiality when using electronic health records by familiarizing themselves with guiding policies such as ensuring information is only accessible to parties involved in patient care and ensuring device security to avoid information withdrawal by uncertified units.
References
HIMSS. (2020). Current strategies to implement informatics into the nursing curriculum: An integrative review. https://www.himss.org/resources/current-strategies-implement-informatics-nursing-curriculum-integrative-review
Hebda, T., Hunter, K., & Czar, P. (2019). Handbook of informatics for nurses and healthcare professionals (6th ed.). Pearson.