As a 90’s kid I’ve lived my childhood without the internet and the digitalization and the most important, without the cellphone. That was the time when you remembered all your friend’s phone numbers by heart and dialed the number on your landline. I remember the time and the feeling when my childhood home got our first computer and internet connection (not wireless). The way how the internet and digitalization has developed is HUGE! And how fast it has happened.
Back to this day. I’ve been working in public health care at the health center for almost six years now, currently I’m working as a nurse in charge/team leader. And the truth is (in my opinion) that public health care is years behind of digitalization even though the digital world has been developing around us all the time. Especially at the health center where I work. Sure, we use different digital systems for example patient record systems, web sites where people can write down their symptoms and contact the health center etc. Currently my welfare district is doing a lot to go forward with digitalization.
Digitalization is the future, but digitalization, robots and AI (artificial intelligence) can’t replace everything in the field of nursing. For example, human interaction is a huge part of our work, and it is important part of people’s everyday life. Though, there is no guarantee that there wouldn’t be human like robots or something else that could be able to do some of the nurse’s work at the health center. Hopefully not but you never know.
Data protection
Everything involves the risks. No matter what you do there’s always a risk involved. Open digital society is no exception. In my opinion general data protection regulation is a good thing. It may help people think twice before they put all their information online and all kind of servers. Or at least it had helped me to think twice before adding my location, ID number or even my name on anything. Seriously I’m not that reckless, but I read more carefully all the information nowadays.
But what comes to work, we are used to follow strict data protection and privacy policy from the day one. There are strict policies by the law that we must follow and keep the patient data hidden from outsiders. At my welfare district’s IT-services have been testing us a few times to find out how well we identify a scam emails. And I think it’s been quite worrying that many people did click the link on that email only in a few seconds after receiving it. Just thinking what would have happen if those would have been a real scam message.
Even though with GDPR there is cyberattacks where hackers try to get as much information and data as possible. But because of GDPR I hope that it is more difficult nowadays. So, like I said before there’s always a risk on everything and I can live with that because every time I enter my personal data on the internet, I accept that risk.
ChatGPT
I asked from ChatGPT the following questions:
- what are the typical professions that works on the health center? I got the correct answers; mainly doctors, public health nurses, nurses, physiotherapists. There also might work social workers and psychiatric nurses. It also says that multi-professional work is necessary at the health center.
- What does a public health nurse do? The answers were correct. For example, work is versatile, and it may change depending on where you work. It answered that a public health nurse can work on public health care, as a school nurse, maternity and child health care and occupational health services.
- What is the role of a team leader/nurse in charge? Again, I got the correct answers. Team leader is a link between the employers and the organization. The main tasks are to make sure that the organization’s aims are well known, support and motivate the team members, support the daily work and organize the work, gives feedback and solves the problem between employers.
That was my first time of using ChatGPT and I got very good answers. I didn’t notice any mistakes and the answers were accurate.
The AI is here to stay. It can help people in many ways and probably will change the work life in the future even more. As the purpose stays good. As many other things also AI can be misused for illegal purposes.
Self-evaluation
The videos were interesting and thought-provoking. All in all, this assignment was interesting to do. It really made me think of open digital society, its pros and cons and how our future will look like.
Even though I don’t think that AI and digitalization will replace entirely the field of nursing, but it will be a bigger part of it. As humans we still need other human to take care of us when we are old or otherwise unable to take care of ourselves.
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Hi Anna!
Nice to hear that you are also an 90’s kid remembering the time before internet. Can you remember the weird noise that we heard when connecting to internet, at the time when it was possible? It was so nerve-wrecking but nowadays it kinda feels as a nice memory from the childhood! Wonder if it can be heard somewhere still… 😀
Interesting to read about your experiences of digitalised working environment as a health care professional. I am a designer and for the past few years I have worked as a UI/UX designer crafting user interfaces for digital products and service. I remember one interesting project that we worked with, where I was a part of a design team to design an interface for health care purposes. We made a digital solution to help people with kidney diseases to manage the dialysis process remotely at home, and our solution was to help the health care professional and the patient to communicate about the process more better, decreasing the need to visit the hospital.
It was very interesting process to work with, and I hope that some day I can involve in those kind of design project again, as I see that in heath care digitalisation has had a huge impact.
Have a nice day!
Br, Heta-Linnea
I agree that digitalisation can’t replace everything in nursing! Digitalisation and AI can’t treat patients. Your writing takes me thinking about older people who can’t ude internet but live in home and nowadays they almost must use computer that there is a nurse who ask how they are doing. That is so sad that people don’t have time to go see every older people to them home.
You reminded me of my own childhood with your memories. I didn’t even remember the sound the internet connection made. We’ve come a long way since then. I also work in the health sector, but on the laboratory side, and I agree that human contact plays a big role in our field. For many people, it is the only contact of the day or week where they talk to another person. Hopefully, people’s central contact will not be replaced by remote nurses and doctors in the future. People’s loneliness cannot be treated remotely, we need to see facial expressions and gestures that shows care for another.
Happy spring for you