The digitalisation has come hard on the field of health care and psychiatry. When I started as a nurse 2015 it would have been absurd to suggest distance reception with a psychiatric nurse via computer. The only way to have audience with doctor/nurse/therapist was primary on the spot. As myself I got a chance to join the digital movement 2021 when one of the private practice employer offered a chance to practice mental health nursing as a remote job. I took my chance. First the customers weren’t finding the opportunity, but when masses woke up – rest is history. Of course there are always people who prefer the old fashioned way, but for my clients – I only got one or two people disappoint by remote being the only option to receive help from our company.
Digitalisation will affect and reform nursing – no doubt about it. I feel that in mental health nursing the biggest assist is with evaluating the situation of the patient. Generally AI assisted documentation etc what takes time from the face to face patient time is and will be a huge upgrade. The most interesting part is how fast can nurses and other professionals adapt the change and also how the patients will react because the change will be so huge and brief. The working environment challenges in new ways – we also need to get educated for the new ways. It isn’t enough that you relay on proofed ways of effective healthcare and face every individual as individual. You also need to be flexible using multiple IT softwares – at the same time.
To keep things positive what AI can give to healthcare. There are multiple upsides. AI can turn medicine from reactive to preventive. if we can focus on preventive care effectively we will save huge amount of resources. Also if we can use AI in Predictive Analytics we can spot folk diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart diseases on time. What I think might be the biggest upside is giving time to health care professionals. When we minimalize the time off patient and maximize time with patient there are tons of upsides. The work doesnt feel anymore that you are not enought when you actually have time to stop with your client/patient and ask how are they. Now we spend tremendous amount of time for reporting for example. Ofcourse there are ethical questions in using AI. Also we cant always know when AI is right and when it is wrong. Also there are huge risks with data protection we need to be aware and react. There is much to be done but I have a feeling that we are on the right way with healthcare and AI. We will need many great ideas and courage to answer the needs of Healthcare with AI.
Nowdays im working in recruiting at the moment. GDPR shows itself on my daily working life. My company cant store contacts for more than 2 years. Also we cant write up about the reasons if someone cant go to work for example we cant inform that the person is on maternity leave – we must write up that they cannot work for the next year. It is also a positive thing that personal information isn’t updated. I have also met couple of individuals who have said that they want their information removed from our systems by the authority given by GDPR – well then we just respect that and delete the info. In some situations it is hard to evaluate is the information given something what is under the GDPR and should not be written as data. My ground rule is that if it feels fishy it is most of the times and rather leave the info out of the context. In personal life I feel that GDPR doesn’t serve a big role in my current life situations.
I had some me time with Chat GPT. I didn’t go that deep with my questions – just something very general. In that kind of conversation chat GPT can be very liable and good helper. If I would ask something particular or something what has been updated recently – Chat GPT has high probability to go wrong and make me believe it that it is the correct answer. For example I can ask how many shades of red there are and CHATGPT might answer 4. Then if I know there is 5 I can say – Hey this is wrong. And chat GPT answers – sorry my mistake! I feel this is the most controversial thing in openAI generally. They make us believe – in lies. This is very frightening.
I got alot of new perspectives when I read another people’s articles about digi society. It was interesting to highlight different aspects what people were thinking about AI. One of those was that age is a great divider between skills with IT. Maybe AI can help to close that cap. There are various ways that AI can help us with that. It can literally do some tasks for you and translation. Also I think that older individuals have some common sense and common caution towards AI and IT which is only healthy. I myself haven’t done any healtcare chores with AI assistance. And I have been out of the healtcare field just 4 years. That is really something to think about how fast we are evolving towards new times. Actually when I started to study nursing in 2010 we still trained to report our daily healtcare tasks on paper. One of my classmates had a training in elder care where they also made the report in paper hand writing. I think that very many people nowdays wouldnt believe that this was only about 15 years ago.
Greatest lesson here was the waking up about how much information there is and how much we are able to reach and use. How corrupted it can be and how precise we must be when we decide what to use and what to leave. Spiderman quote feels right here. With great power comes great responsibilities.
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